Have I completely removed Kaspersky?
I followed your advice Q to remove Kaspersky from my PC. However, while investigating why Wordpad was taking ages to start, I discovered an entry for Kaspersky lurking in the ‘Network adapters’ section folder in Device Manager. Then, Windows would not start up. After restoring my system, I ran a Kaspersky-removal tool that I found. On restarting my PC, the offending network driver had gone and Wordpad now opens normally. Are there likely to be any further nasties left behind by Kaspersky? Tony Steele
A You’ve already solved your problem, so we’re publishing your question partly for reassurance and partly as a cautionary tale.
On that latter matter, it’s never a good to idea to randomly remove drivers just because you believe | them to be suspicious. You didn’t say specifically but we think in this case you removed Kaspersky Security Data Escort Adapter, which is a virtual device driver attached to the VPN elements of that program. We don’t know why it was left behind when you uninstalled Kaspersky, but removing it manually resulted in your PC failing to boot – so now you understand that this was a bad idea.
Thankfully, we can reassure you that, as you’ve now downloaded and run Kaspersky’s ‘kavremover’ tool, there should be no remnants of the program on your PC. For the benefit of other readers, this is a free download from www.snipca. com/41538.
Simply double-click the downloaded kavremvr.exe file to launch the tool (see screenshot 1 ), choose the relevant Kaspersky program from the dropdown menu 2 , type the scrambled code to prove you are human 3 and then click Remove 4.