Microsoft Security Essentials disabled by cutwail virus.

I’ve come across this a few times and I’ve always let Hitman Pro do its automated fix.. but I wanted to know how to fix it myself.

So far it seems that the folder is removed and replaced with a link.. there isn’t a way to recover what was once there. You have to rename the broken folder and then reinstall Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE).

I also found that while these symlinks were in place Internet Explorer thought that _everything_ you downloaded was a virus:

“This program contained a virus and was deleted.”

Renaming both the c:\Program Files\Microsoft Security Client and c:\Program Files\Windows Defender folder resolved that problem.