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I've noticed some leftover registry keys from Adobe Flash although I removed it months ago:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Macromedia
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Macromedia
I tried to delete them but I didn't have the necessary permissions so I made sure regedit.exe was running with admin privileges but it still wasn't possible. So I did some research and found this tutorial to take ownership of registry keys but the deletion still didn't work! After that I used runassystem.exe to open regedit.exe as SYSTEM but again the same error! And after that I tried to give the full ownership as SYSTEM to my user account and all Administrators... same error!
Well, then I searched my whole C: drive and found two folders:
C:\WINDOWS\System32\Macromed\Flash
C:\WINDOWS\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash
Both of them contain exactly the same files:
I tried to delete them as admin... didn't work! Not even with Lockhunter!
Lockhunter says there's no process blocking these folders so I tried to delete them but yet again... it didn't work! So I clicked "delete at next system restart" and rebooted. At log on it prompts that the deletion was successful but guess what? The folders are still there!
What the hell is this? In what world is such a behavior acceptable from a "legitimate" company? How to delete Flash completely?
Have you tried using Autoruns to check if any of these programs are loading on start up? – BillDOe – 2017-08-11T18:52:15.060
Yes, I've searched for every file individually via filter but none of them were found. I also tried to open the files with
Ctrl + O
but it only says "The file is corrupt". – Clacers – 2017-08-12T08:38:32.320