SEP client uninstallation fails at 75% with error code 1603

Products

• Endpoint Protection

Issue/Introduction

During the uninstall process, you can see that for around 75% of the uninstall process, the process fails / hangs and the SEP client is still installed on the system. The return code is 1603.

Besides CleanWipe, no other method you use (control panel, cmd, PowerShell) removes the client. 

 

Cause

In the MSI uninstallation log you can see the following records:

MSI (s) (DC:8C): Doing action: PrepCloseUI
Action start: PrepCloseUI.
MSI (s) (DC:B4): Invoking remote custom action. DLL: C:\WINDOWS\Installer\MSI5051.tmp, Entrypoint: PrepCloseUI
PrepCloseUI  Reading 265144 bytes from stream
PrepCloseUI  (Error Unable to write to stream (Result: 0)
PrepCloseUI Fatal error: Unable to write to stream (Result: 0)
CustomAction PrepCloseUI returned actual error code 1603 (note this may not be 100% accurate if translation happened inside sandbox)
Action ended: PrepCloseUI. Return value 3.

Resolution

The uninstallation process likely fails due to the User Interface related processes ongoing on the client system.

To proceed with the uninstallation, first kill SEP processes with command "smc -stop".

 

Additional Information

Reference: https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/151294/how-to-manually-stop-and-start-the-syman.html