antivirus updates failure

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

I'm using Kaspersky at the moment, and it has developed an odd and worrying bug- run updates refuse to take. It is stuck on a set of virus definitions from the 24th; running updates result in the package downloading but completely failing to install, it just comes up with the same definitions out of date alert.

Wot? Is this an embargo thing? Why is this happening? How do I fix it?

[TheFeniX]

Have you tried downloading the latest version of the program and uninstalling > reinstalling?

[Mr Bean]

Run this on your computer
Takes three minutes and it's great about finding things that break other antivirus programs. Note it does not update and it's designed for usb outside use so it's run, remove restart and then that's it. If it finds nothing start looking into un-install/re-install or just boot into safemode and try and update.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

The latest version of Kaspersky, aha, failed to install; swallowed a ~500mb download and did smeg all with it, again failure to update.

Not sure if virus, other malware or simply dodgy settings really- I gave up in the end and started in on Windows Defender; running win 8.1 and Google Chrome now. Bean, i'll give that a shot and see what happens.

[TheHammer]

The latest version of Kaspersky, aha, failed to install; swallowed a ~500mb download and did smeg all with it, again failure to update.

Not sure if virus, other malware or simply dodgy settings really- I gave up in the end and started in on Windows Defender; running win 8.1 and Google Chrome now. Bean, i'll give that a shot and see what happens.

If Bean's app doesn't fix it, I'd recommend deleting the databases then downloading new ones. I've run into issues in the past where a corrupt AV database won't update, and simply uninstalling/reinstalling the app doesn't delete the database by itself.
http://forum.kaspersky.com/lofiversion/ ... 10858.html

If none of the above works, some additional steps here to try"
http://support.kaspersky.com/us/8582#block8

[Edi]

Nuking the install to the ground level (meaning uninstall, followed by manual deletion of all related folders and possibly registry entries as well) and then reinstalling usually fixes problems of this sort. If Kaspersky has a separate uninstallation tool for that purpose, I recommend using it. The only correct way to remove things like Norton, F-Secure (any variant), Norman, McAfee or AVG among others is to use the separate nuke utility from the vendor. Otherwise you get all kinds of remnants shitting up your machine and possibly preventing the correct installation of a different AV.

Even with the nuke tools, I've had to sometimes go and axe remnant folders from %appdata%, c:\programdata and the program files folders and then comb through the registry to remove stubborn entries related to those programs before things start working correctly.