How to Remove Panda Antivirus

Panda Antivirus and Panda Internet Security are fairly popular products that many people have enjoyed using. A customer brought in a computer the other day and needed help installing the latest version of Panda Internet Security 2009. His computer already had Panda 2008 installed and the installation for the 2009 version was failing everytime he tried to install it.
Each time he tried to install the software, it would bring up the following screen during the installation and the installation would end. The screen told us the installation failed because "traces of previous installations have been detected" on the computer. Leaving no antivirus software installed. No matter how we uninstalled or reinstalled, the same error message appeared time and again.


Any removal through the Add/Remove Programs option in the Control Panel failed, because nothing regarding Panda existed in the Add/Remove listing.

I proceeded to download automatic removal utilities from Panda Software. Listed below are the utilities I tried.

Panda 2006 Removal Utility

Panda 2007 Removal Utility

Panda 2008 Removal Utility

Panda 2009 Removal Utility

Unfortunately, running any of the above automatic removal programs STILL did not solve the problem and I was left with the "traces of a previous installation" error. A windows service called "Panda Process Protection Service" and a driver called "Panda Process Protection Driver" remained in the system and refused to be deleted.

Then I stumbled upon a Panda Security Utility that did the trick. If you are experiencing similar issues, please give this procedure a try.

1) Download the PandaSecurityUtility and save it to your desktop

2) Once the file is downloaded, double-click on it to run. For Windows Vista users, you'll want to right-click on the file and click Run as Administrator so the program has the correct permissions to uninstall the software.

3) When the utility finishes, search the computer for the file C:\Windows\RAVTC.tmp and delete it if it exists.

4) Now reset the Winsock catalog by following these directions:

* Click on Start, Run
* Type CMD and press Enter
* On the black screen, type the following command and press Enter

netsh winsock reset catalog

* Type Exit and press Enter to close the command prompt

5) Restart the computer

6) Install Panda software (this time it should work)
What began as a simple uninstall/reinstall job turned into about 4 hours of trouble, however at last the problem was solved. Hopefully, this information will save you time and headache if you run into the same type of problem.