Symantec Endpoint Protection Client Uninstall “Error opening installation log file”

The problem

Recently, my company updated their anti-virus to use System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection (which is effectively Microsoft Security Essentials for the Enterprise.) I noticed that the Symantec Endpoint Protection client was still installed on the company laptop, and when I tried to uninstall – from add/remove programs – received the error:

“Error opening installation log file. Verify that the specified log file location exists and is writable”

Figure: Windows Installer – Error opening installation log file.

The solution (which is very simple)

Login to your system using the local admin or administrator account, and run the install from that account.

It seems that – even though my domain account was a local administrator – there was something the uninstaller didn’t like with my domain account, the non-domain local administrator account worked fine!

An aside

I must admit to being quite happy to have Symantec’s Endpoint Protection replaced with Microsoft’s own Endpoint Protection. I had been using Microsoft Security Essentials for years on my home systems, and it really does live up to its advertisement of being “the anti-annoying, anti-expensive, anti-virus program” (it is free anti-virus for home users and small business with up to 10 PCs, and I highly recommend it!)

See:


Figure: System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection client side GUI. 

Comments