It is sometimes necessary to manually remove/delete a windows service, this may be because during uninstall the application did not remove it or because the source was malicious. In any case this should be the last resort as it involves editing the registry. Before you continue with this take a back up of the registry.
- Run Regedit or regedt32.
- Find the registry entry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services
- Find the service there and delete it. You may wish to look at the keys and see what files the service was using and perhaps delete them also.
Note:
- It is necessary to reboot before you will see the changes in the server manager list.
- Some applications including malware often change the permissions to make it more difficult for you to delete them. In these cases you right click on the ‘service’ in regedit (regedt32), go to permissions and grant the administrator full control before the service can be deleted.
This has been tested with Windows NT 4, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7(Ultimate).
