If you have DPM Protected Computer that goes away before you uninstall the agent, it isn’t obvious how you get the agent removed from the console.  Or at least it wasn’t immediately obvious to me.

1. In the Management/Agents tab, right click on the agent (it will have a red x and “Unavailable” in the Agent Status column) and select Uninstall…
2. Verify your list of agents (you can select more than one)
3. Click on “Uninstall Agents”
4. Enter the appropriate credentials.  This must be an account that has permissions to remove the agent from the DPM server, even though the Protected computer doesn’t exist, it still has to be a valid account.
5. Select the “Manually restart the selected servers later” radio button
6. Click ok.

So far, that isn’t any different than any other client uninstall.   At this point, you will have the option to close the window, and go on about your business.  And if the protected computer was still available, that would be perfectly fine to do.  But since the protected computer isn’t still available, you have to wait for the error to pop up.  First you will see that the uninstall failed and then you get this message:

Basically, it says, I couldn’t find that computer to remove the agent, you want me to just forget that it existed?  You click on “Yes” and then the entry for that computer is removed from the DPM database.  Now wasn’t that obvious?

One of the REG_EXPAND_SZ values on the right is the UninstallString.  If you copy that value and paste it into the command line, it will politely ask:  Are you sure you want to uninstall this product?  If you are sure you want to uninstall it, go ahead and hit Ok.

If you want to get rid of both pieces of Forefront ( the Security State Assessment Service, and the Client Security Antimalware Service) you will need to find both registry keys and run both uninstalls.  There is a catch though…  the Client Security Antimalware Service has a value that looks like this: MsiExec.exe /I{436028CD-6476-4224-9274-8F0320F30FD1}.  To get it to uninstall, you need to change the /I to /X like this MsiExec.exe /X{436028CD-6476-4224-9274-8F0320F30FD1}.