a couple of days ago I downloaded and installed Avast Home
(most recent version). I decided it wasn’t for me, so I went
thru the uninstall routine to remove it.
I discovered that the uninstall routine left behind quite a few registry
keys. I was able to remove some of these manually, but some are
persistent and I’ve been unable to remove several. (Why didn’t
avast uninstall remove ALL of them)???
An example of a key:
SYSTEM
ROOT
Legacy_Avast!Mail Scanner
0000
DeviceDesc “avast! Mail Scanner”
I have tried the aswclear tool. Regedit and a couple of different
registry editors (EasyCleaner and JV16) without success.
Regedit tells me that “Unable to delete all specified values”
How do I get this crap out of my registry and off my machine???
The legacy keys are controlled by windows and in due course windows will remove thise, they shouldn’t get in the way.
As for manually getting rid of ‘Legacy’ keys (not just in this instance relating to avast) you have to take ownership of the registry key as they aren’t user created/authorised.
I don’t think Windows remove legacy keys automatically.
The CurrentControlSet it removes, but the legacy I think not.
To manage the legacy ones you need to delete value by value, key by key, ascending in the key tree.
Or, like David said, take ownership of it.
Well when you install new security software, I believe that would replace existing Legacy key. The problem being that legacy keys are system level so can’t easily be removed by user level cleaners/application/manually.