Uninstalling MS AntiSpyware

[Peter Crickman]

Hi,

I used the Control Panel | Add / Remove Programs applet to uninstall MS
AntiSpyware recently. The other family members (users) of the computer tell
me that the blue- and green-titled popups still appear at random times when
they are logged onto their User IDs. Is there a clean uninstall checklist
available to make sure all components of the application have been removed
(including registry entries)? I do not see any of the reported background
MSAS applications being loaded at startup.

Thanks for any help,
Peter

 

[D@annyBoy]

ask the others to login using their IDs and uninstall

 

[Peter Crickman]

When I login into one of the other user's accounts, there is no entry in the
Add / Remove Programs list for MSAS. What else could be causing the MSAS
warning popups to still appear for these other accounts?

 

[Bill Sanderson]

You might delete the original installation directory for Microsoft
Antispyware.

You will also file a collection of gc*.* files in %windir%\system32

I haven't verified each of these carefully, but they all look related to
Microsoft Antispyware to me. You might create a temporary subdirectory for
them and move them there.

If something then was still running on the alternate accounts, you should
get some error messages--either when trying to move or delete these various
files, or when the other accounts log in.

You'll need to resolve these errors by removing things from the startup area
involved.

This is a strange one--I'd like to hear what you find.

 

[Peter Crickman]

I found two dlls in the windows\system32 folder: gccollection.dll and
gcms5query.dll. They both have GIANT or MS AntiSpyware listed as their
Company Name in the Version information under the Properties menu option.

I will temporarily moved them to a temp folder and see if any additional
errors persist.

I have searched the Run keys for all of the accounts and see nothing that
points to MSAS.

I am assuming the original installation directory for MSAS is c:\program
files\microsoft antispyware. Are there any other folders that have dlls or
executables (besides the aforementioned system folder) related to MSAS like
c:\program files\common files?

 

[Bill Sanderson]

Not that I'm aware of. I've never looked into what this program stores in
the registry, and the only locations on the drive I'm aware of are the
program files location and system32.

I've never tried to dig into this in a careful systematic way, but I'd be
surprised if there are more.