Using Norton's Power Eraser (Caution)!

Not necessary since I caught it at the time. I posted this for others who may be thinking of using it as additional protection because not everyone reads the fine print and the number of MVPs and Community Moderators who casually recommend third party software (especially virus scanners) without actually making clear the risk before they send people to various links and say DO THIS TO SOLVE YOUR PROBLEM with no warnings at all I just wanted to remark that there are issues here.

Not everyone is as advanced in tech savvy as you are and not everyone is necessarily even going to notice, at first, that this third party cleaner they were told to use cleaned out some essential .exe files necessary to running windows.

Not, at least, until they try to restart their computer and can't because essential files are missing.

What are you saying? That you would prefer I NOT warn people who may be new to all this?

And, if so, WHY???

This goes without saying, it clearly stated in their official website and this the statement:

"there is a risk that it can select some legitimate programs for removal. If you accidently remove a legitimate program, you can run Norton Power Eraser to review past repair sessions and undo them. "

https://security.symantec.com/nbrt/npe.aspx

Since it is Symantec's product , you may contact them and report this issue.

No one preventing you from posting here, the point here as it already been discussed, it is less likely many people would read here and in most cases, they will see the warning by the website itself.

You also mention there is a program which is safe and it is incorrectly detected by NPE, so I recommend you to report this program to Symantec so they would investigate and if it pass their criteria they add it to the whitelist , so it won't be detected as malware next time.

Put simply, no unskilled user should ever use Norton Power Eraser for the very reason being discussed, since it requires far to much knowledge to be used safely by anyone not fully familiar with the operation of both Windows and every single application installed on their PC.

As for warning people via such a post, it's unfortunately a pointless effort.  No unskilled user ever frequents forums such as this and only a very small percentage will even arrive here after an event occurs.  Even if they should happen to find this via a search query, in most cases it will be too late since they'd be finding the warning after the fact.

I'm not telling you that you can't do this, only that there are better things you could be doing with your time to help others.  More posts here and elsewhere about such edge issues with tools that only knowledgeable users should be using only add to the overall "noise" and mass quantities of information that search queries provide.  This is why I'm completely clear when discussing such tools myself as to whether they are truly useful to the non-skilled user, since anything else is simply more noise.

Rob

FWIW, NPE is not one of those few third-party scanners we use to recommend here at MC ;)