[Xperia Z1 Compact Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] packetfire:
Thanks for your kindness... my problem is clearly that I do not know how to install Super-SU and remove Kingroot manually, and the Super-SUme script seems to do some sort of damage to phone-side USB functionality in the specific case of a Sony Z1 compact running Android 5.1.1 before being rooted. (Saying this clearly so the next guy can find this with a search)

So, is there a set of instructions that allows one to do by hand what is done by Super-SUme? I'm sorry to be so clueless, but it has been several years since I unlocked a pair of phones for my wife and I, and in that time, Android has gone from 3.x to 5.x.

Kingroot can be copied over to the root directory of the 5.1.1 phone, and it runs without problem, so then the problem may be a result of the work done by the Kingroot developers to maintain a toehold on each smartphone their tools root.

=-=-=-= Warning, Opinion Follows, Use At Your Own Risk =-=-=-=-=

There is a disturbing/amusing post here on xda from the Kingroot guys that describes the various tools that remove their software as "malware". The loss of perspective that the use of such a term evinces is troubling. Or maybe revealing of the actual motivation of the Kingroot guys. [I dunno, I'm so old-skool, I designed computers that used "ECL", and "bit-slice ALUs", and none of them was smaller than three refrigerators, not counting optional STC vacuum-column 6250bpi reel-to-reel tape drives. Shoot, that was so long ago, we did not even buy any "ones", we'd have a guy come in 3 days a week to cut zeros in half, and bang them flat to hand-craft the "ones" for us so we we'd have both ones and zeroes! (^.^) ]

One would expect that the Kingroot fellows, being in the unlocking biz, would figure out for themselves that if they made the same error as the phone vendors, and made anything extraneous "irremovable", that they would need a stopwatch to measure they very short time lag before someone came out with a countermeasure to remove the extraneous stuff they installed when unlocking to allow the removal of vendor extraneous stuff. If their "purify" tool is any good, people will seek it out and use it, and some will pay for a "pro" version. If it is not any good, people will remove it, no matter how they try to make it impossible to do so.

The fact that I paid $3.99 to the Super-SUme guy to sell me code to remove Kingroot and Purify easily should be a lesson to the Kingroot guys. The fact that the tool failed to do the job properly and screwed up my phone is beside the point. The point here is that the Kingroot guys have not built confidence in their integrity, and the fact that they tried to "bundle" extraneous irremovable stuff with their root exploit and made their root exploit hard to remove/replace positions THEIR OWN product as the "Malware" and the Super-SUme product as "Malware Removal".

I don't care if the download is 100 Gig, if he Kingroot guys distributed a package that did not have to "phone home", and could be installed on a phone with no SIM card installed, and no WiFi, and if the resulting rooted system did not try to "phone home to Shenzhen", and could be easily modified as the user saw fit, including removing the whole mess and replacing it with Super-SU, I don't think anyone would have any problem with paying the $3.99 (or even $9.99!) to the Kingroot guys directly, rather than to Google Play Store, so that the Super-SUme guy gets $1 or whatever.

But clearly, there are some who think that money is not what the Kingroot guys are after. And that's the scary part.