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Friday, March 09, 2012

(Re)Installing Comodo Firewall

A little, unexpected and unnecessary, ordeal happened today with Comodo Firewall. I had installed Spybot while I was troubleshooting some malware on our family PC. Then I run Comodo Firewall installation in order to block any unwanted traffic in and out of the machine. However, it turns out that only parts of the firewall were installed. I guess none of the registry entries were written and who knows what else. My suspicion was that Spybot was blocking some parts of the installation. So I removed Spybot and tried again. However, the installation would not proceed.
Then I tried manual removal. I deleted files in Program Files \Comodo but that did not help. The installation would stop at only a few percent with Error 1603. I used Unlocker to delete the remaining files in the directory. There was a Windows service cmdAgent left in there. I removed the service entry with Autoruns.
After reboot the PC did not have the Internet access. There is a Comodo network driver installed and that failed to work with all the files deleted. So I removed that in Safe Mode from the network adapter.

I also, during the above activities, tried running the unofficial Comodo Uninstaller but I did not understand what I was supposed to enter at the command prompt. I was typing "I acknowledge the risks" and the message afterwards flashed so quickly that I did not know whether it was successful or not. Only after 100 repetitions I figured out that the message was indicating that there was something wrong. The user is supposed to type in '1' or '2', not the full acknowledgement text. Phew. That worked, then, and it removed (or tried to remove) whole lots of stuff from the computer.

Running installation after this worked. However, most components were not installed this time. All the kernel drivers and services were missing. At least this time the uninstallation worked properly.
The installation after this looked much better. The dashboard notified me that I needed "to restart the computer for some changes to take effect", so I did. I clicked "Fix It" and it restarted the computer.

And then, finally, everything was fine with the firewall.

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