My customer has had several technicians before me who handled their services, none of which knew how to write down passwords or other vital documentation.

I was faced with an issue regarding ESET NOD32 today. A couple of computers had an old (undocumented) configuration of their antivirus.
As it turned out the clients had Protected setup which means you cannot access the settings, or un/reinstall the program without a specific password. It also happened to not be set up to talk to the appropriate Remote Administration-server.

So to start things of I needed to either reset the password or get the client to connect to my Remote Administrations-server to get the right policy. I decided to go with resetting the password.

There are three ways of doing this, listed below in my preferred order;

A) Hack it!

If you have physical access to the client you can do the following.

  • Reboot into safe-mode. (only needed if NOD32 is in self-protection mode).
  • Remove the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Eset\Nod\CurrentVersion\Info\PackageID
    Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
    
    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ESET\ESET Security\CurrentVersion\Info]
    "PackageID"=-
  • Reboot

B) Use official tools (uninstall)

This article describes how to uninstall ESET NOD32 without supplying the password, using “ESETUninstaller”.
This solution requires a third-party program (from ESET), that’s why it’s not my first option.
http://kb.eset.com/esetkb/index?page=content&id=SOLN2289

C) Contact Customer Support

I hate waiting for customer support. So that’s why this is my last way out.
http://kb.eset.com/esetkb/index?page=content&id=SOLN333

Hope this helped you. Let me know if you find any other ways of working around this issue!