re-installing AVG anti virus

You could be using an account that does not belong to the Administrator group.

This could be a corporate domain joined machine with lockdown policies still on it. When laptops leave a company, there can be a processing step where the locks are removed.

I would start by looking at the accounts on the machine, and what groups they belong to.

control.exe : User Accounts : Manage another account

and see what accounts are available for administrator. The pattern could be suggestive of a corporate laptop.

This is not the time to use Windows Store Reset (WSReset.exe), as you might not have the elevation needed to do much of anything. Check the account situation first.

The machine will allow you to remove all Administrator access. This used to be easy to fix, with osk.exe hack or stickykeys hack. The claim is, those are closed, and consequently I cannot speak in a public forum, about any remaining methods for regaining admin. A Corporate machine should have more protections against doing such things. Since some fool listed all the methods on a webpage, the Microsoft dev has a platter to eat from, when it comes to plugging them.

If you have a machine that smells of Corporate, ask the person you got it from, what the deal is. A silly slip-up on proper procedure ? Or theft ? I wouldn't work on such a machine, because it would be a PITA to fix. A Repair Install, maybe it won't even let you run Setup.exe from the ISO9660 for Windows installer disc.

But that flag, the first line in this post, is a signal you can't ignore. It tells you that you are paddling upstream for some reason. Maybe a malware did it. IDK. But my first impulse would not be WSReset.exe . That would only apply if you "felt like an Administrator". Maybe the AVG does that as a parting gift ? Still sounds suspicious.

Paul

IME it is ok at uninstalling itself - but it can have difficulties if you accumulate a mismatch of different versions - then the installer for the most recently installed one, may not erase all traces of previous versions if they were not uninstalled previously.

All ok now Paul.

Using the *strip out* from the AVG site cured the issue and Defender runs happily.

While researching the problem, I came across a suggestion that Microsoft may have built in an override on defender: where their system was being marketed by *box* vendors taking a bonus for commercial pre-installed protection software.