On my current project they deploy PSExec to all machines. The downside? It is a version from 2004. Yes, that is right from over 5 years ago. Needless to say, there has been nothing but problems with it. Granted, PSExec is probably one of the easiest things to upgrade as you just need to upgrade the version that you are calling PSExec from. It then copies itself out to the machine and does it’s job. However, if the old version was ever tried against a machine, you may be in some weird state like we were where PSExec wouldn’t start, or it would and wouldn’t close, etc.
Stumbling along the internet I found someone else who had this issue. However, his processes doesn’t always work because there may be something hanging onto the PSExecsvc.exe file still. Instead I recommend using the following batch file.
sc %1 stop psexesvc
sc %1 delete psexesvc
del %1admin$psexesvc.exe
del %1admin$system32psexesvc.exe
It just deletes the service before it tries to delete the files. Works like a charm.