As my licence for Kaspersky was running out, I recently decided to shop around and decided to swap to Avast which gets better reviews and has a free version that does everything I need. Having installed Avast it was time to remove Kaspersky. The obvious thing was to go to Settings > "Apps and Features" and uninstall each of the 3 components (Security, Internet and Password). No luck, the uninstall of Security hangs as soon as it starts to delete the components. The other two components refuse to uninstall because the first one is still uninstalling, despite having abandones that uninstall.
OK, go into startup, stop everything with "Kaspersky" in its name and reboot. No luck, still won't uninstall.
Time to play rough. Use Windows Explorer (or it can be done from the command line) to forcibly delete the Kaspersky folder in C:\Program Files (x86). A lot of files get deleted but there are still some that can't be. Nevertheless, run a registry cleaner (I use CCleaner) - lots of "Kaspersky" entries removed. Reboot. More files can be deleted now, but there are still about 8 DLLs that can't be no matter how I try.
One thing I didn't try was deleting it from inside safe mode, that might have worked. There is a similar question from 5 years ago where this was one answer.
1 Answer
Googling the problem finally throws up kavremover which comes with a load of warnings about only using it under direction from Kaspersky themselves etc.
Works a treat, the last few files have gone together with their folder and all other traces.
I suppose I might have saved a lot of time if I'd Googled the problem earlier, but I've never come across a piece of software so difficult to remove and which was still throwing up renewal reminder / reinstall boxes when reduced to just a handful of DLLs.
