Uninstalling HP ProtectTools Security Manager and DigitalPersona Pro

Scenario:

You are upgrading your HP ProBook laptop running Windows 7 to Windows 10 to avail the Free Windows 10 upgrade feature. During the Windows 10, install you’ll be prompted to uninstall both “HP ProtectTools Security Manager” and “DigitalPersona Pro” software as they found to be incompatible with Windows 10.  However, when you attempt to uninstall “HP ProtectTools Security Manager” it results in various errors like:

• This action is not valid for your Operating System
• This action is only valid for products that are currently installed
• The msiexec verbose uninstall log reports “MSI (c) (B0:C0) [15:20:43:475]: MainEngineThread is returning 1605”
• Running the “Fix problems that programs cannot be installed or uninstalled” tool never finishes uninstalling “HP ProtectTools Security Manager”

Solution:

The quickest solution that I tried and worked for me is to manually cleanup the “HP ProtectTools Security Manager” Files and Registry. For “DigitalPersona Pro”, I just needed to remove the files.

·         Export below registry keys, just in case. < ?xml:namespace prefix = "o" />

o   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\HPProtectTools

o   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{422BA615-2133-4DC0-8673-09C8CC7557F2}

·         Delete below registry keys along with subkeys

o   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\HPProtectTools

o   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{422BA615-2133-4DC0-8673-09C8CC7557F2}

·         Move or Delete below folders

o   “C:\Program Files (x86)\HP ProtectTools Security Manager”

o   “C:\Program Files\HP ProtectTools Security Manager”

·         To cleanup “DigitalPersona Pro”, just cleanup its folders from “C:\Program Files (x86)\” folders.

 

 

References:

• Microsoft: Fix problems that programs cannot be installed or uninstalled