Force Uninstall Espionage

[dvkeys]

I upgraded to Mountain Lion and imported applications from my old Mac, one of which included the Espionage Application. Now, Espionage won't work and gives me the 'unable to communicate with Espionage Helper' error message. I would like to completely uninstall espionage and reinstall it under Mountain Lion in order to reestablish the correct file / folder relationships under Espionage 2. I can't use the program's native uninstaller because I cannot get past the error message. I tried a different solution from this forum, but I can't find any preferences (.plist) file for espionage. Please let me know how I can uninstall Espionage completely when I cannot open the program at all.

[zsolt]

Hello, the easiest way is to delete the plist which you cannot find, however it must be there as it is created whenever Espionage tries to load. Maybe you are no looking in the right place.
Please write the following command from terminal:

sudo find / -name *.EspionageHelper.plist -print

and hit enter, it will ask you for your login password, this is OK, just enter it and then hit enter.
This command will search your entire disk and list if it finds any file name EspionageHelper.plist

This will reveal the path the file is in, and then you can delete it, reboot and Espionage should start fine after that.
The reason for trouble is probably the change of your home folder path after migration.

If this does not work, yes you can manually uninstall Espionage, but again one of the files you have to remove is exactly this plist file, here is the complete list of files you have to delete:

/Users/[your username]/Library/Application Support/Espionage
/Users/[your username]/Library/LaunchAgents/com.taoeffect.EspionageHelper.plist
/Users/[your username]/Library/Services/EspionageMenu.service (might not exist)
/System/Library/Extensions/iSpy.kext
/Library/iSpy
/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.taoeffect.ispyd.plist
/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.taoeffect.Espionage.plist (might not exist)
/Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/com.taoeffect.Espionage (might not exist)

Let me know if you did not succeed.

Rgds
Zsolt

[dvkeys]

Thank you very much. I notice that the folders leading to the files were hidden. Probably another security feature of Mountain Lion. I ran the terminal program and then just copy and pasted the file paths into Safari. A finder window opened showing me exactly where the files were. I deleted them and will try restarting the computer to see if it works.

AFter deleting the .plist files and restarting the system, Espionage didn't work and gave me an error message as follows:

Could not load Espionage's helper, got error:

Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=1 "launchctl: Couldn't stat("/Users/DKeys/Library/LaunchAgents/com.taoeffect.EspionageHelper.plist"): No such file or directory
nothing found to load
" UserInfo=0x10591e3c0 {NSLocalizedDescription=launchctl: Couldn't stat("/Users/DKeys/Library/LaunchAgents/com.taoeffect.EspionageHelper.plist"): No such file or directory
nothing found to load
}

Try restarting, or contact support (include this message).

I reinstalled Espionage on top of the broken system install and restarted again. Espionage worked and I was able to invoke the native uninstall command. I will now put a clean install of Espionage on my system.

[zsolt]

Well the result is a bit strange, but important that you managed to run the built in uninstaller.
Let me know if after the new installation you still fact problems.

Rgds
Zsolt