Disabling Antivirus: How To

To date I've written several articles listing the processes that need to be killed in order to ensure a specific antivirus program is completely dead and will not interfere with your SolidWorks installation or service pack upgrade.  I plan to continue to post more of these as versions change and as I discover new software in use.

What I didn't write before was exactly how to kill all the hindering processes and services; I just told you what they were and left that for you to figure out.  So here's the how to:

1. Download Process Explorer (works with XP and Vista) and get it running.  Here's a direct link to the download file http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/ProcessExplorer.zip.  If you're not sure what it is and want to know more go here and you can see some screen shots and additional info.  http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/processexplorer.mspx  You must run process explorer as an admin user so you can see the Company Name column. This can easily be done with a right click, run as...
2. Once you have process explorer up and going take a look at the company name column and note every process that is associated with your antivirus and antispyware.  Also to double check, hover your mouse over each and every process and look at where the file is being executed from because the Company Name column is sometimes blank or not correct.  If it's from the folder where your antivirus is installed add that to your list of processes to kill.
3. As an optional step you can compare the files you've found to the files I have listed in my other articles to make sure you got'em all or let me know if you've found any new ones.
4. Once you have the list you can go through and right click on each one of the processes and choose Kill Process Tree.
5. If you can kill them all this way that's great but more often than not there will be one or more that will not die... for example rtvscan.exe with symantec antivirus and this is the one that really causes the problems so don't you dare ignore it and install anyways because you don't know how to kill it.  Keep reading... We'll get there
6. Right-click on my computer and choose manage... When Computer management comes up look to the bottom of the left-hand pane and expand Services and Applications and click on services.  Now in the right-hand pane scroll down untill you see the services associated with your antivirus software.  Be aware that the name of the service may not be the same as your antivirus software. For example McAfee's services are called Network Associates...  Once you've located the services, right click on them one at a time and choose Stop.  There will be anywhere from 3 to 8 services, which may or may not allready be stopped.  To verify, make sure and look at the Status column and confirm that it is empty.  It's important not to forget about your antispyware in this step.
7. If this did it and all the processes are stopped, you should now be able to kill that last of the processes, (step 4) if they're not already dead.  Be aware that just because the service is stopped does not necessairly mean the process is stopped, and in the end it's the process that we really need to kill.  If there is a process that will not stop, which again is more often that not, you'll need to keep reading...
8. For those processes that will not stop you will need to double click on the process and set it to disabled(most likely it is set to automatic before you change it).  at this point you will need to restart your computer and start from the top (step 4, assuming you still have the list you made in step 2).  The processes you already killed will be restarted when you reboot so you'll have to kill them again.
9. If for some reason you can't disable the service it is because you are not an administrator and you will need to log off and log back in as an admin to complete step 8.
10. Lastly after your Installation is complete make sure and remember to set whatever services you set to disabled back to automatic.