AntiVirus Woes

I haven’t updated for a week, due to a few emergencies hitting here.  One was that my AntiVirus installation was broken, and unable to update its virus definitions.

I’m going to say up front that this is the first time I’ve had issues with this particular software, and have run it successfully over a lot of years, on everything from a lowly netbook through to a dual core.  The reason I’m saying this is to note that this appears to be an anomaly, and I will still recommend ESET’s NOD32 AntiVirus to anyone who stays still long enough to be harrangued.

So, now to the problem.  An error kept occurring during update: “Undocumented serious error (0x101a)”.  A quick search of ESET’s knowledge-base led me to this article.  I followed the instructions, but unfortunately at the end of it, I still wasn’t able to update, and had to move to the last instruction of uninstalling, then re-installing NOD32.

This is where my problems continued.

In hindsight, I should have seen this coming.  I often use third party uninstall front-ends, rather than the standard windows Control Panel->Add/Remove Programs.  Usually this is because they give me slightly more information about the install of a particular program.  In this case, I’d been ignoring the fact that one front-end had been telling me that it couldn’t uninstall NOD32 as there was something wrong with the uninstall information.

When I tried to uninstall, I got an error message telling me there was a Network Error reading from “C:\WINDOWS\Installer \eav_nt32_enu.msi”.  It’s a somewhat curious error, especially that space after ‘Installer’, since no such directory exists.  The “Network Error” I’ll ignore, since sometimes operating systems abstract away access to disks, networks and so on, so they all look the same.

I sent an email to ESET Support, and was pointed at this knowledge-base article on manually uninstalling ESET products.  I went through booting into Safe Mode (pressing F8 at the boot menu, if you’ve forgotten. I certainly had.  This works for XP.  I’m not sure about other Windows installations) and running the Uninstaller.  Unfortunately it crashed on me when it tried to do the uninstall.  Something was very broken.

It occurred to me that perhaps if the uninstall information was that badly broken then maybe “just” removing it would fix things.  I had already downloaded the Windows Installer Clean Up (The article mentions the Office Suite, but the Windows Installer Clean Up can be used for any .msi installer – which luckily NOD32 uses).

I ran the Installer Clean Up, and then NOD32 installed perfectly.  I’m going to have to remember that solution in the future.  It’s only taken me a few nights of stress to get here.

Isn’t technology wonderful?

About Lisa

A Geeky Gamergrrl who obsesses about the strangest things.
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