Dear Symantec Community,
I am new to this forum and I make some mistakes as a newbie, please do advise me on best practices when using this forum. Please bear with me.
I was handed a relatively old workstation in my office to perform several upgrades. One of them involved upgrading the computer's Symantec Endpoint Protection to the latest version in the 11.x line.
The computer possesses an unmanaged client of Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0.5002.333 (RU5) and is running Windows 7 Professional 32 bit. During the upgrade process, I stopped the Symantec Management Client, before first upgrading the platform to SEP RU6 11.0.6000.550, and then to SEP RU6a 11.0.6003.833. At this point, I was told to restart the computer, and this was where the problems started to surface; each time the computer boots into normal mode OR Last Known Good Configuration, the Blue Screen of Death DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error pops out, effectively rendering it unbootable. The affected file appears to be WpsHelper.sys, the IPS component of SEP.
I tried to uninstall SEP in safe mode (the only bootable mode left) which obviously does not work because the Windows Installer Service doesn't ever start in safe mode. Applying patches at this point is futile even though I am aware that there is supposedly a fix for this file that prevents the error, but I believed that the computer has never connected to LiveUpdate for at least 4 years because this is a spare unit and is on temporary loan to a client.
What steps should I take to rescue this system, without having to reinstall the entire operating system? System restore was turned off at the time of the installation so going back to an earlier image of Windows is not possible.
Any advice is kindly appreciated. Thank you!
-it_geek