How to Remove Personal Protector | Personal Protector Removal Guide
Personal Protector is a rogue antivirus program that is advertised through aggressive advertising and fake scan sites. Fake scan sites are web pages that upon loading appear to be running a virus scan or other check of your local computer. In reality these are usually simply an animation and every visitor to the site will see the same results. When installed on your system, Personal Protector will appear to scan your hard drive and claim to find many problems, virus infected files and the like. In order to fix those problems it claims you will need to buy the software. This is a scam as there really isn’t anything wrong with your computer other than personal protector. Read on for how to remove personal Protector.
First you should try to go to the control panel and add/remove programs and attempt to uninstall personal protector this way. If this succeeds you should still continue to install a tool such as malwarebytes antimalware and a trusted antivirus such as avg/fprot/etc. to scan your pc with each and make sure that everything is clean.
The next step in an automated removal of personal protector would be to download malwarebytes antimalware (from the virus removal toolkit page.) While you are there you may also wish to download process explorer as you may make use of it further in the cleanup process.
Install, update and run a full scan with malwarebytes antimalware. If you are unable to install malwarebytes try the following 1) rename the installer from mbam-setup.exe to something like firefox.exe, then retry the install 2) reboot into safe mode and retry the install (you will need safe mode with networking to update it and you may also make use of option 1 if necessary.) 3) follow the next step for killing off the running processes associated with Personal Protector and then retry the install.
The following programs are associated with personal protector and should be killed off using the task manager. If the task manager is unable to launch you may try the following instead. 1) copy the program taskmgr.exe and paste it to the desktop. Then rename it to firefox.exe and retry launching it. 2) restart in safe mode and retry to launch the taskmanager. 3) Use process explorer instead to kill off the following processes:
personalprotector.exe
un.exe
The following files and folders should be deleted for a manual removal of personal protector:
%docs%\All Users\Microsoft PData
%docs%\All Users\Microsoft PData\inetprovider.dll
%userprof%\Desktop\Personal Protector.lnk
%userprof%\Start Menu\Programs\Personal Protector
%userprof%\Start Menu\Programs\Personal Protector\Personal Protector.lnk
%userprof%\Start Menu\Programs\Personal Protector\Uninstall.lnk
%progfiles%\Personal Protector
%progfiles%\Personal Protector\base.wdb
%progfiles%\Personal Protector\baseadd.wdb
%progfiles%\Personal Protector\conf.wcf
%progfiles%\Personal Protector\personalprotector.exe
%progfiles%\Personal Protector\quarant.wdb
%progfiles%\Personal Protector\queue.wdb
%progfiles%\Personal Protector\un.exe
%progfiles%\Personal Protector\q
%wn%\tempfile2.bat
Even after a good manual removal of personal protector I would still install, update and scan with malwarebytes antimalware and a well known, well trusted antivirus application to clean up any registry damage, or other files leftover by the infection with personal protector.