I accidentally installed MPC Cleaner and now I can't get rid of it. It's as tenacious as genital warts and just as annoying. Trying to uninstall it is like trying to detach yourself from your own shadow. It has the survival instincts of Ripley from Alien.

What is MPC Cleaner and why do I want to remove it? Well, it masquerades as antivirus software by calling itself a "cleaner". But it's no more of a cleaner than Dr Dre is a real physician. MPC Cleaner pretends to clean your PC, but it secretly tries to install other malware. The only place it will clean out is your bank account, and the only thing it will wipe is your hard drive.

Here's a list of failed ways that I've tried to uninstall MPC Cleaner so far. (Or just click here if you just want to know the solution.)

I can't close MPC Cleaner with Task Manager

Here's MPC Protect Service running in Task Manager.

I clicked "End task" but nothing happened. The program just keeps running, like Forrest Gump in that scene where he runs a lot.

I can't manually delete MPC Cleaner's files

Next I went to C:\Program Files\MPCCleaner. There was no uninstall file, so I simply clicked the executable file and pressed the delete key. Here's a screenshot of me highlighting the file.

Observe what happened next.

The message says that "You need permission from Everyone to delete this file". Surely I am everyone, since I'm the only user on the computer?

It transpired that the owner was a group merely called Everyone. Ha ha ha. You can see this by right clicking on the file, selecting Properties, choosing the Security tab, and clicking Advanced. See?

What's more, Everyone has "Full Control" over the file. There are no other permission entries, which means I'm not permitted to delete the file. Well, we will see about that!

I changed the owner to myself. To do this, I clicked on the word Change next to Owner, and typed in my user name - Paul Jones.

Then I clicked Check Names, and finally, OK. I also gave myself full control over the file by clicking Add, Select a principal, entering my user name, clicking Check Names, clicking OK, then choosing Full control out of the permissions. Now I had full control:

But look what happened when I tried to delete the file:

It says, "You need permission from PAUL\Paul Jones to make changes to this file". I NEED PERMISSION FROM MYSELF? That's real philosophical.

I also tried giving full access to myself in other ways, such as by adding SYSTEM, Users and Administrators, but I still couldn't delete MPC Cleaner. I think this shitty software changed something in Windows so that no matter what I do, I'll never get permission to delete it.

I can't remove MPC Cleaner with Unlocker, File Assassin and RegHunter

Next I tried free software Unlocker to unlock the files. Unlocker said it had done the job, but it must have been lying, because I still couldn't delete any of MPC Cleaner's files. So I then asked Unlocker to delete the files for me. Here's what it said:

THE OBJECT COULD NOT BE DELETED. Even the specialists can't delete the file. By the way, the files were still there after I had rebooted the computer.

Then I tried FileAssassin, which simply gave a cheery "The file could not be deleted!"

I also tried registry cleaner software RegHunter. It said it fixed some registry errors, but didn't delete the damn files.

Command prompt can't delete MPC Cleaner's files either

Next I tried to delete the files using command prompt. I open the command prompt and typed cd C:\Program Files (x86)\MPC Cleaner, followed by del MPCProtectService.exe. But no luck here, either. Command prompt simply replied "Access is denied".

I can't even perform a system restore

Then I tried a more drastic measure - a system restore. This should have reverted the computer settings to an earlier point.

But after an hour of struggling, Windows finally gave up:

I give up...

My amusement at this point had been replaced by fatigue. Meanwhile, MPC Cleaner was still cheerfully running in the background.

It was like I was Kasparov and MPC Cleaner was Deep Blue. The software would always be twenty moves ahead of me. The only solution was to throw the whole computer into the fires of Mount Doom.

I believed MPC Cleaner changed some information deep within Windows, which means I couldn't close nor delete its insidious software. But there was always the nuclear option: restore the computer to factory settings.

The solution: Norton Power Eraser!

In my darkest hour, someone named Susan left a comment below about Norton Power Eraser, free software from Symantec. I eagerly tried it. Here's a picture of Norton Power Eraser after it had finished its scan:

The software flagged MPC Cleaner as malware and erased all its files and folders from my computer! Hurrah!

As you can see from the screenshot, Norton Power Eraser also uncovered other malware files, like goldfresh.exe, traneco.exe and geotip.bin.