Endpoint Protection

"Moving, renaming or deleting the 'Symantec Endpoint Protection' Start Menu group, triggers the reinstall / repair setup."  Symantec Document ID: 2008041011570448

This problem exists for me on both Vista-Ultimate and XP-Pro machines. If the Endpoint Start Menu group is moved, renamed, or deleted, the Endpoint program reinstalls itself after every Windows reboot, or randomly while working in Windows at any time.

The only Symantec solution to this annoying characteristic is to reinstall the entire program, but using certain parameters, i.e. leaving out any sort of Start Menu group creation.

However, I'm a student at a major university and our Symantec Endpoint anti-virus product is supplied to us as an executable file, without the ability to alter the Start Menu group creation - nor can we get help from the university staff on this particular issue (they don't know what to do about it). Therefore this solution from Symantec won't work... for me or for any of the TENS OF THOUSANDS of other aggravated students around the country in my same boat.
 
I want the freedom to organize my Windows Start Menu the way I want to organize it, without ANY program constantly reinstalling itself simply because I dared move, rename, or delete its menu location.
 
If anyone knows of a solution, other than the above Symantec document's requirement necessaiting a "network administrator pushed down solution" for this annoying,silly, aggravating Start Menu monitoring bug, can you please let me know how to fix it.  I and all my friends thank you!

And please, I'm not a network administrator or computer guru (though I am substantially computer literate).  Please speak in plain English for me... using complete sentences without overdoing the techie jargon so I can keep up with you.  Thanks!
 
rheineck@yahoo.com

Do you go to my university? :-)

What you're experiencing is a common, useful but sometimes anoying, feature of the Windows Installer (Windows Installers come as .msi files, but often have a .exe file to launch them). The Windows Installer has a healing feature that checks for things being moved around, deleted, or corupted and "fixes" them.  It certainly is not isolated to Symantec Endpoint Protection, but any software using the "healing" features of the Windows Installer.

Odds are the executlabe file you're getting could be extracted via a program like 7-zip (a nice freeware archive manager).  Once you do that, you probably can find any scripts they use to install the program or may find that it was just running the MSI directly.  Depending on what exactly they did, you might be able to change the installer's behavior, but I can't be specific not knowing what your University's IT staff may have done.

If this request came accross my desk, I would have provided you an installer that didn't cause these problems--but I'm a few layers behind the help desk people.  Have you tried to escalate your request?