Well, I’ve tried it three times and had to resort to a Restore Point every time.
When trying to uninstall Avast 7.0.1474 on my 64-bit Windows 8 system, the uninstall disables the keyboard. Which makes it kind of difficult to fix much, though luckily I had a recently made a guest account without password - otherwise I was screwed.
Can anyone help?
The problem is that Avast! fails to remove its keyboard hooks from the registry. The solution is to restore the system to a point where Avast! is installed, remove the hooks, then uninstall Avast!. I used the uninstallation utility rather than uninstalling from the control panel, since my Avast! install was messed up from the system restore.
Open the following link, then use the manual instructions to remove aswKbd from the keyboard’s UpperFilters keys. I didn’t try the .reg file since it probably wasn’t written for Windows 8.
avast does not like system restore… when using it you must turn off avast self protection first
try running avast removal tool from safe mode. http://www.avast.com/uninstall-utility
Thanks for the feedback, that’s the link I used to get the uninstall utility.
The reason I recommended system restore is just to get Avast!'s keyboard-filter driver back so I could use my keyboard again. Avast was already broken and I didn’t mind. The recent upgrade to Windows 8 did that.
Once I restored and got my keyboard back, that’s when I could remove aswKbd from the registry using the instructions at the link I posted. I restarted, then ran the cleaning utility. It recommended running from safe mode, and once I accepted, it rebooted into safe mode and ran automatically.
At this point, I restarted, installed Avast, and everything was great! 8)
For unintalling AV’s I use Revo it scans for left over files and registry keys left over.
Hmmmm… Revo is terrible good with common applications. Terrible bad with security programs (antivirus/firewalls). Take care.
Each AV has their own removal tool designed to fully uninstall left overs after the normal uninstall has completed.
Never use a generic uninstaller like Revo to remove an antivirus program.
You can find these removal tools at:
http://singularlabs.com/uninstallers/security-software/
Don’t bother with other useless cleaners:
http://my.opera.com/rejzor/blog/2012/08/19/avast-cleanup-tool-1-0-released
Uninstall it the regular way, reboot as requested by the app and then run my cleaner. That should do the lenghty cleaning job in few seconds.