I’ve been a long time fan of Trend Micro, but when it comes down to it, you may need to uninstall it for several very legitimate reasons, such as purchasing an old laptop with it installed, taking over a client whose previous IT people used Trend Micro and didn’t hand over the passwords, etc.ย Back in August, I published a post called Uninstall OfficeScan 10.5 without a password. As it turns out, this has been one of the most popular posts on my entire site. In that post I’ve had several questions on how to uninstall OfficeScan 10.6 without a password. Thanks to a user named chokpig who helped us find the answer, and Damian and Wade who tested it, I’m happy to post it here for others to find.

NOTE: If you need to keep your antivirus installed, but want the ability to deactivate it when needed without a password, please instead check out myย Unload OfficeScan 10.6 without a password article with steps provided by a commenter of this post.

After spending several hours today creating a Trend Micro OfficeScan 10.6 lab, I finally got it installed so I could vet out this solution and get the screen shots I needed as well as the exact steps, and hangups. Here goes.

  1. Because Trend Micro’s 10.6 product includes a service that helps protect the registry from being edited by malicious programs (or users), you can’t actually begin editing the registry until you disable the services that protect it. I tried several methods, including trying to stop the services (which won’t work because they are protected), killing the active processes (which won’t work because they too are protected) and deactivating the OfficeScan client using the icon in the bottom right corner of the screen. None of these methods worked for me.What did work however was disabling a key service, the Trend Micro Unauthorized Change Prevention Service. It took a bit of research before I figured out the trick to this, but the key is to stop the service before it has a chance to launch by disabling it and then quickly moving on to step two to edit the registry. To do this, open a command prompt and type in services.msc. In this window, find the Trend Micro Unauthorized Change Prevention Service.TrendMicroUnauthorizedChangePreventionService
    The service should not be running if you’re doing this right after a reboot. Quickly double click on it and change it to disabled and click Apply.DisableServiceThis disabled the protection of the registry and allowed me to make the change in the next step. If this service is allowed to start, you will have a bit of a time getting it to let you edit the registry.
  2. Edit the registry key to allow uninstall by running the registry editor (regedit.exe) and browsing to the following key:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\TrendMicro\PC-cillinNTCorp\CurrentVersion\Misc.

    TrendMicro106RegistryEdit
    Set the value toย of Allow Uninstall to 1.

    SetValueto1

  3. After the registry key is successfully edited, go to Programs and Features, or Add/Remove Programs, depending on your operating system, and uninstall Trend Micro OfficeScan 10.6 client as you would any other program. After a brief pause, you should start to see progress uninstalling.TrendMicroOfficeScanUninstallation

With that, you should be on your way! If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave a comment below. If nothing else, let me that it worked for you!