Microsoft Anti-Spyware and Windows Defender

[Katie Melton - Salisbury University, MD]

Hi,

My campus is in a WinXP environment. We have about 2000 computers on our
campus and all of them are running various versions of Windows Defender and
Microsoft Anti-Spyware. We need to remove all versions of the software from
our campus because of software conflicts and errors that users keep receiving.

We need to implement this removal through SMS and have been unable to find a
removal tool that removes all versions of Defender or all versions of
Anti-Spyware.

Are there any removal tools that work?

Thank you for your help.

 

[Milo \(MSPSS\)]

Hmmm an automated system wide removal, but for the Beta Microsoft
Anti-Spyware I would recommend to proceed with the regular uninstallation
to better remove all the file that came with it or you can proceed using
this.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301

Hope this would help.

"Katie Melton - Salisbury University, MD"

 

[Katie Melton - Salisbury University, MD]

I don't think this is what we're looking for. This would still require us to
visit each machine. We need something we can automate.

Katie

 

[Bill Sanderson]

The rather meager group policy file that comes with Windows Defender does
allow disabling it pretty well. I wonder if that would be enough? What I'm
uncertain about is whether all the various beta versions would be
affected--the policy file was not available until product release.

I have not looked at group policy in a long time--I'm not even sure where to
find the .ADM file at this point. I took a brief look on Vista and didn't
find it!

I believe we had a scriptable uninstall for the beta version--it would have
involved a batch file using msiexec to remove the product. Again, the
various beta versions would be a hazard.

Unfortunately, the machine which has an archive which might have notes on
that is dead with a power supply failure for a bit, not sure how long it
might take to get it replaced by Shuttle.

I think that the group policy settings might solve your problem of
interference, until you can work out an uninstall method. If the thing
isn't doing anything, it can wait until you need to touch a particular
machine.



"Katie Melton - Salisbury University, MD"