I’m an earthlink member and I installed their “Earthlink Protection Control
Center” (made by Authentium), it’s an antivirus/spyware/firewall suite.
Anyway I ran leaktest and the firewall was penetrated, so I uninstalled from
add/remove programs. I assumed everything went as planned because it even
asked to reboot. Anyway I installed avast as my virus scanner and zone alarm
as my firewall, they work fine, but in the Windows Security Center under
firewall it doesn’t say ZoneAlarm like it should instead it says:
“At least one of the firewalls installed on this computer is currently ON. A
firewall helps protect …
Note: Two ore more firewalls running at the same time can conflict with each
other.”
Under virus protection it says: “Windows found more than one antivirus
program on this computer and at least one reports that it is currently up to
date and virus scanning is on.”
As a test I uninstalled avast and zone alarm and went back to the security
center and it listed Authentium under firewall and virus protection even
though it’s uninstalled. So that means the uninstall didn’t do what it was
supposed to do. I contacted Earthlink but they weren’t any help, they told me
to download windows clean up, but that won’t get it done for me because
Authentium isn’t on the list of things that it can remove.
Automatic updates is set to on, but it hasn’t been downloading anything. I suspect all this is connected.
So what can I do to make this record of Authentium go away and it just list the software that I have installed. And get automatic updates going again.
PS. As you have already uninstalled you may only have to do part of the manual uninstall as the rest should already have been done. The problem is probably that a registry entry has been left. But, be warned editing the registry is dangerous!!
Well this is the product I have (don’t know what Earthlink 5.0 is): EarthLink Protection Control Center. I have a cable connection, it’s actually from brighthouse, but I signed up through earthlink and it’s configured for them. This is the only thing on their support center about removing PCC: http://kb.earthlink.net/case.asp?article=68963
and that’s not different from what I already did. I did look at the part about editing the registry in the link that you provided and there is a HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\EarthLink directory
So can the instructions for Earthlink 5.0 be applied to my current problem. Should I just follow the instructions for that removal and delete the entries related to Earthlink?
I don’t know if this will help you, but I spent a long time working out what was wrong with my Windows Security Centre.
I had the security centre reporting that I had two firewalls running even though I knew that I had deleted one of them. The problem was caused by the database held in WMI file, which was not cleared correctly during the uninstall process.
After hours of frustration I finally found a link on the web that advised me the following: (sorry I no longer have the actual link)
In control panel click on Administrative Tools, then Services, from the list of services find Windows Management Instrumentation and right click and stop the service.
Locate folder C:\windows\system32\wbem and find the sub-folder inside called “repository” and delete this folder.
In Administrative Tools find Windows Management Instrumentation service, and re-start by right clicking and pressing start. Restarting this service re-builds the repository folder with information about your installed firewall & antivirus.
Re-booting the computer resets in the Windows Security Centre, hopefully this will cure your problems.
there is no one file in C:\WINDOWS\system32\wbem called wbem, there are numerous files that start with wbem … wbemads.dll, etc. (16 different onesto be exact).
back to your first post, it was a little confusing to me because there is a sub folder in wbem called repository: C:\WINDOWS\system32\wbem\Repository. that’s why I was unsure about this instruction: “Find folder C:\windows\system32\wbem, this is the repository folder containing the incorrect data, and delete the complete folder.”.
Am I suppose to delete the entire ‘C:\WINDOWS\system32\wbem’ directory or just this sub directory ‘C:\WINDOWS\system32\wbem\Repository’?
Its a good job that you questioned the last instruction as having looked in the folder jogged my memory and I agree that it is only the repository that you need to delete!
The instructions read: “The problem was with Windows Management Instrumentation and the fact that its database was now incorrect. To fix this, I had to (1) stop the WMI Service, (2) delete the “repository” folder in C:\windows\system32\wbem, and (3) start the WMI Service. Starting the service rebuilds the deleted folder and the database. Once I restarted my system, Windows Security Center no longer showed McAfee Firewall as running.”
