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What's the easiest way to remove Etrust antivirus en masse?

Background: I'm installing AVG on each of the clients and need to remove Etrust antivirus. I'm looking for a way to automate it. We have Windows 2008 SBS and Windows 7 clients.

MikeyB
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resolver101
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There's no "magic bullet" for this kind of thing. Look at the uninstall string specified in HKLM\Softwrare\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall and see if you can throw on some switches to make it silent. If it's MSI-based then you can probably do a "MSIEXEC /qn /x {guid}" and get it to install. (It looks like some older versions were MSI-based so you might get lucky...)

Your worst case will involve sending keystrokes to the uninstaller dialogs to "hand puppet" the program to make it uninstall (and if it has a CAPTCHA or other brain-damage then that's out,

Evan Anderson
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  • Just remembered i wrote a powershell script a while back that removed programs. This will remove the etrust. $ListOfApps = gwmi win32_product $ListOfApps | Where-Object {$_.name -like '*etrust*'} | foreach {msiexec /uninstall $_.IdifyingNumber} – resolver101 Mar 16 '12 at 11:10
  • Ah I spoke to soon. Not sure why but the script worked OK on one machine but not on the others. On the others i receive the message after running the command above "this installation package could not be opened. Verify that the package exists and that you can access it, or contact the application vendor to verfy that this is a valid windows installer package." If i run EtrustITM.MSI i can remove the program by selecting the un-install option. Any ideas how i can automate this? – resolver101 Mar 19 '12 at 16:35
  • Any ideas how i can automate this? – resolver101 Mar 26 '12 at 15:52
  • @resolver101: If you can get these "problem child" installs to uninstall with an `msiexec /qb /x ETrustITM.MSI` executed while in the current directory with the ETrustITM.MSI file then, I'd say, throw those files up onto a server w/ an uninstall script and run that as a startup script. – Evan Anderson Mar 26 '12 at 17:39