SOLVED: How To Uninstall ESET Antivirus Without a Password

Manage service provider that we help out from time to time called us with a curiosity today. It turns out that they just signed up a new corporate customer and our moving them off of ESET antivirus in favor of Windows Defender.

The problem is they can’t uninstall ESET because they don’t have access to the admin console and the previous managed service provider won’t tell them the password to perform the uninstall one by one or even through a script.

Fortunately, we have been through this with one of our clients and have the answer, AND their new customer is very small and they can go desk to desk, server to server and manually uninstall ESET using this simple-ish process:

1. Take note of the network card information (i.e. IP address, DNS…) because this process may result in the NIC needing to be installed
2. Download the ESET Uninstaller from ESET here, or from us directly here
3. Copy the ESET Uninstaller to the machine in question
   • We like putting these utilities into C:\TEMP\ but you can put them anywhere you have access
4. Reboot the computer into SAFE MODE
   • Yes, this will work on Windows Server too
5. CD into wherever you have the ESET Uninstaller and run it (i.e. C:\Temp\ESETUninstaller.exe)
6. Uninstall the the ESET ENDPOINT SECURITY first then the ESET REMOTE ADMINISTRATOR AGENT
7. Reboot and have a nice day