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Remove Sophos Completely from PC

Hey everyone I don't know if this is the right place so forgive me if its not.

Sophos Home 4.0.1 is wreaking havoc on my computer. It is blocking almost everything I try to download, even basic things like Discord or perfectly legit and safe programs. I've lost access to a lot of my files as well because of Sophos.

I want Sophos removed entirely from my PC but I cannot seem to remove it. My PC only has 1 account and it is indeed an administrator account. Here is what I have tried so far:

1. When attempting to uninstall Sophos Home via the Windows "Add or Remove Program" feature I get the following error "Uninstallation failed. Failed to stop the service: Sophos AutoUpdate Service"

2. When I attempt to stop any of Sophos' services that are currently running via the the Task Manager it literally doesn't work. Right clicking on any Sophos process and clicking "end" does nothing at all and the process continues to run.

3. Attempting to manually delete any file related to Sophos returns the following error: "You require permission from SYSTEM to make changes to this folder"

4. Attempting to access Sophos' registry keys in regedit returns the following error "Access denied"

I am at an absolute loss of what to do...

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Top Replies

Sophos User930 over 1 year ago +1

You need to disable tamper protection first Sophos Home (Windows) How to disable Tamper protection – Sophos Home Help

0 Sophos User930 over 1 year ago

You need to disable tamper protection first
Sophos Home (Windows) How to disable Tamper protection – Sophos Home Help
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0 Seyer@dmin over 1 year ago

I had this same exact problem with Sophos still seeing a long removed Trend Micro product. I had to get ahold of the Sophos Zap utility because even with Tamper Protection disabled the Updated service would not stop and I couldn't remove Sophos. After running the SophosZap Program twice it is gone now and I just have to reinstall it with the "SophosSetup --nocompetitorremoval" command according to support to get it working without trying to remove Trend that doesn't exist and failing.
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0 Gunnar Knutsen over 1 year ago in reply to Seyer@dmin

I had to download a Sophos removal script onto a thumb drive on my work laptop and then transfer it to my PC. Then I had to run it in PowerShell safe mode after disabling all Windows Security measures to finally rid my PC of Sophos.
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0 Seyer@dmin over 1 year ago in reply to Gunnar Knutsen

Wow, that is a lot of work. I guess with home it must be different that the enterprise version.
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0 Qoosh over 1 year ago in reply to Seyer@dmin

If you can locate the "avremove.log" file in the C:\Windows\Temp\ directory, the logs will shed some more light on what was actually detected. If the competitor product has already been uninstalled, there are likely remnants from the installation that Sophos is still detecting.

You can find further details on what to do next in the following article under the section "Third-party software isn't installed".
- Failure to install Sophos due an issue uninstalling a 3rd party product

In short, you'll need to use the product identifier that is reported in the avremove.log to locate and delete it from the registry.

Kushal Lakhan

Team Lead, Global Community Support
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