This either will be a solution (again, deja vu of the past) or I'll be asking for a solution.
Situation:
User laptop
Was Win10, Anniversary Edition
Was offsite, out of touch for many months
In the meantime we upgraded to SEP 14.1, and users are on Win10 CU.
The laptop comes back in and it's got Win10 CU. Fine. Some do that. It's on CU on its own so I don't have to upgrade it. It took a while to get the laptop back in.
There's no SEP installed though. Windows Defender also isn't on.
I reinstalled SEP v 14.1. I thought maybe it was something with the Win10 CU happening on its own.
After that first reinstall, SEP 14.1 appeared in the programs list. Also in the taskbar right side icon tray. But there was no green dot and I couldn't right click and update content. I could run SEP and it did get updates. It also popped up with a red "fix needed" banner when it was first started.
Defender appeared to be off.
I uninstalled SEP, restarted. Tried to reinstall but it errors out.
I kept getting "Error 2343: Specified path is empty."
Found this more recent post. I found other ver 12 ones from 2011 with similar fixes (but it didn't seem to work now).
https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.TECH197...
There's no info in there though, is there?
Also tried - manually deleting the c:\program files x86\symantec folder and under C:\programdata symantec. No change in trying to reinstall.
Found this post.
https://www.symantec.com/connect/ideas/how-fix-err...
I looked in here.
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products\
And I found this key. E9D5D74D72B13814ABD5F7FD5628105F This is manually typed if there's a typo. SEP was on the list.
I deleted that key. Tried to install again, and it appeared to be installing. So I started this post in case it helps anyone else.
But it didn't work. No SEP on the programs list. Nothing in the taskbar, lower right. I do see a C:\program files x86 symantec folder, but there's no much in it. Ditto on c:\programdata\symantec.
It's behaving like SEP v 12 with earlier Win10, if you didn't disable Windows Defender first.
How do I get SEP uninstalled completely? Then shut off Defender? Then do a fresh v14.1 install?