Yesterday one of my friend gave me his IBM system to refresh the installation and all the configuration to factory settings. I did a simple restore to the operating system and the whole system was restored to its factory settings. There was no specific requirement given by him to me except one to install Microsoft security essentials on this system. I was very confident and was not bothering anything like stated above but when I hit this problem I was kind a shocked that I was not able to install despite of doing all my trick to install Microsoft security essentials on that machine. I tried to think again and find few things and one of them worked for me.
The operating system was windows XP home edition and was some four years old. I started the windows updates and installed the updated windows XP service pack on the newly installed system and then started the installation of Microsoft security essentials but still I was failed. The thing that I was missing in this whole scenario was to uninstall another security software installed by default on the newly installed system and there was another thing and that was to restart the system after installing the windows service pack three on installed system.
Windows service pack three was having the updates for Microsoft installer and as the system was not rebooted one reason of installation failure was this but on the other hand the major thing that was preventing the installation was the presence of another security software installed on that machine.
Work around to mitigate this problem of installation of security essentials is given as under:
1. If there is another security software installed in your system, please uninstall it first before continuing the installation of Microsoft Security Essentials.
2. If you have older version of windows service pack please upgrade to the newer version or at least install the latest version of windows installer.
