I have some friends I help with their PCs over phone, and since they have CIS 7.0, it was difficult for me to guide them when I myself was using the good old CIS 5.12.
So, I found a way - guaranteed to work 100% if one is really careful - to update my 5.12 to the 8.0 beta.
The AV and Defense+ …I have never bothered to use them so much, it is the FireWall that is the reason I use Comodo.
There are very many people who like to just “fire and forget”, i.e. just select one single choice, and then let the rest be automatic.
I’m not like that; my firewall policy consists of 295 programs with 493 rules, and 18 global rules,
and I have defined 136 IPv4 address ranges in the Network Zones.
Since I have used ca 4 years to gradually come up with this policy, it was important for me not to loose anything.
And I was willing to use several hours of my time to be sure that it would not be any problems.
This is how I did it.
I was so lucky that I got the pc from a friend here, he wanted me to install a new disk, Windows, a lot of specific programs, and Comodo.
I installed Comodo Internet Security 8.0 beta on that pc, then immediately after the first reboot, I exported the configuration.
Now I had access to a fresh configuration file, with the version 8.0 tags (e.g. the Condition=“Os==Vista || Os==Win7”)
I then exported the configuration I was currently using from my own pc, from its CIS 5.12.
Now I opened up both the 5.12 file and the 8.0 file in UltraEdit.
(You can use any editor that understand XML formatting, and which does not add extra stuff to your file.)
Then I compared each and every section;
editing the 5.12 file,
pasting in the new version 8.0 tags and stuff from the 8.0 file,
adding new sections that did not exist in 5.12,
replacing some of the lines in the 5.12.
After using a few hours, I had changed my 5.12 file into a configuration file that was exactly as if it had been exported from a CIS 8.0…!
Some stuff I remember I did:
Since I was going to import this as a 4th configuration file, and start using it, it was kinda important that it did not have the “COMODO - Internet Security” name,
since there is already one default with that name.
So I changed
intoI noticed that some stuff had been given new GUIDs under
The 8.0 looked like this:
while my 5.12 looked like this:
I chose to use the new GUIDs for those two, but kept my original GUIDs for all the others.
(I could not find any other GUIDs that were changed).
Ah, I forgot to mention…
…the reason I knew that these two GUIDs were not just “random” was because I also had access to a version 6.12 configuration file,
made from a 3rd computer a couple of years ago,
and I found that both the 6.12 and the 8.0 file had these two GUIDs
- so I knew that they were not random, and that they had been changed from the ones in my 5.12.
In the … section, in addition to the <Settings…>… and … subsections,
there is a new tag at the very end.
I believe this is formatted like this, with only that single tag, because it is empty.
When I got to the firewall section:
The first line
<Settings …
- this contained some new entries, and there was also a different interpretation of the “AnalysisMode” number.
I chose to just use 8.0 line directly, replacing the old 5.12 line, meaning I would start with the default values,
and then I could instead change the settings into the ones that I wanted through the GUI after I had got CIS up and running.
Luckily, there was no change whatsoever in the format for the rules themselves;
meaning I could just leave the whole 7500+ lines
…
section as it was.
All in all, there was not so much difference from the 5.x format to the 8.x format
Still, it takes a while, since you have to compare each of the ca 1400 lines of the new, fresh 8.0 file,
with the 5.12 file, making 100% sure that nothing is missed or overlooked.
When the “5.12 changed to 8.0” configuration file was finally ready,
I just had to un-install CIS 5.12, and verify that there were no files, folders or registry keys left…
…ah… that reminds me…
…while the CIS 5.x uninstaller did a pretty good job,
making sure the files were almost 100% cleaned,
and the most of the important registry stuff under the [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Software\COMODO] branch was deleted…
- there were some CLSIDs etc that were not removed.
I saw that some Comodo keys taht were still left, had been changed in two time periods
- those periods were many months after the original installation date,
so I am sure they are related to 2 updates of CIS.
After all, it was CIS 5.3 that I installed, but it had been updated into CIS 5.12 over the years.
I then used a tool for finding all registry keys that had been changed in these two time periods
(each period lasted only a few seconds, typically of an installation / change, i.e. just like an update would look like)
- and then exported the results out to a text file that I could make into a “DeleteAllTheseKeys.reg” file.
The result became this reg file:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Software]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ComodoGroup]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Folder\ShellEx\ContextMenuHandlers\Comodo Antivirus]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\file\ShellEx\ContextMenuHandlers\Comodo Antivirus]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Drive\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\Comodo Antivirus]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\*\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\Comodo Antivirus]
[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ComodoGroup]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Wow6432Node\TypeLib\{7A27FFB6-B771-4159-81DA-1F3CCEF5A23C}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Wow6432Node\AppID\{47730F83-7966-4F56-9AF5-15CADFABBEFC}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Wow6432Node\AppID\cmdaruns.DLL]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\TypeLib\{7A27FFB6-B771-4159-81DA-1F3CCEF5A23C}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Interface\{C3EBFC4A-27BD-4D4A-AA1B-D2872666FCCD}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Interface\{5B01FCF4-35B9-417C-8D4D-321BC2CE7FCE}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Interface\{185B89F3-E51A-413B-8310-750F490D1406}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\cmdaruns.AutorunEnumerator.1]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\cmdaruns.AutorunEnumerator]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{C3EBFC4A-27BD-4D4A-AA1B-D2872666FCCD}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\AppID\{47730F83-7966-4F56-9AF5-15CADFABBEFC}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\AppID\cmdaruns.DLL]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Interface\{F2B830DA-DF8E-4CBF-946F-DED196916210}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Interface\{E2CC28CC-68B2-440E-AE74-C93399CF37E2}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Interface\{D69AE3A4-3DEF-4031-B711-3D051A47C14D}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Interface\{CEEFE079-2327-43E6-8002-94564FC09D56}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Interface\{C6EBC129-535C-497C-AA55-59A712EF0C34}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Interface\{A68C849C-2AFF-4F08-8EAA-80475AA2B199}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Interface\{A5E3A461-651E-4E3F-95A1-B765749C52CA}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Interface\{7BDBBCBE-8A78-4A7A-9A3B-D8265CCFBA27}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Interface\{46E040B5-3395-4B9A-985D-E498640315AB}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Interface\{157A3B3A-0924-4141-A222-F99BD5B2925A}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Interface\{10D82495-7F93-4C84-901A-65A9E1DED8EB}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Interface\{08D1F165-8BCE-402A-B74B-FFBCC9157E80}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Interface\{0007AEEC-58C3-4461-A605-D2F25EDFAA52}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{C6EBC129-535C-497C-AA55-59A712EF0C34}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{B06A48DF-C1B5-46B2-BC5B-60DC79C3106C}]
(I have no idea if this is just me that was unlucky, or if everyone will have these left-overs after using the CIS 5.12 uninstaller.
Btw, I say “5.12”, but in Programs and Features, it was listed as 5.3, as that was the version I installed, on February 28th, 2011.)
Then, after the deletion of also these registry keys,
and since I was forced to reboot when the uninstall finished, so that was already taken care of…
- I could start the installation of CIS 8.0.
After the installation had finished, I started CIS, and right away, I imported the “5.12 changed to 8.0” configuration file,
As soon as the new configuration showed up in the list, I then chose to Activate it.
Since CIS at that time was already doing a lot of stuff, it being the very first time it was running and all,
it first asked me whether I wanted it to save the changes it had currently done to the default “COMODO - Internet Security” 8.0 configuration file,
before activating that new “5.12 changed to 8.0” configuration file… - I then chose No.
Though, that didn’t really matter much to me, since I am never going to activate any of those 3 default profiles.
After it had downloaded the antivirus definition update, it wanted to reboot, I clicked OK,
and then when it had rebooted, I opened CIS to verify that all my important firewall rules were OK,
and then changed the main firewall settings to the values that I had in 5.12
(since that was the one thing I could not get properly through the manual editing of the configuration file.)
In the end, everything worked out 100% perfect! 
8) :-TU