I'm only posting this for prosperity because I already fixed the issue but I want users and ESET aware of this.
Version: 7.0.302.0
Windows 8.1
I had an installation that wouldn't upgrade because it always said it couldn't stop the ESET service saying I didn't have permission (my account is the original administrator on this box) and would even suggest a reboot. That wouldn't work either. I couldn't manually stop the service either.
The only way I could fix this was to boot into safe mode to the command prompt, manually delete the entire ESET directory tree one folder at a time (how I miss "deltree") then boot back into normal mode. Since the service is no longer running, I could finally reinstall 7.0.302.26 as a new installation from scratch and everything was fine.
