Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Have you ever installed a BETA or CTP or an RC build of some Microsoft product such as Visual Studio, and then been faced with the unhappy situation that it could not find the installation sources when you attempted to uninstall the product, or it just didn’t uninstall “cleanly” – leaving traces of Registry entries that prevented you from installing a later version? It’s certainly happened to me several times. But today I ran into a program called Perfect Uninstaller that, for $35, turned out to be one heck of a bargain. Perfect Uninstaller has three modes to completely and totally uninstall any program. It starts out using the regular Windows Installer, but it doesn’t stop there – even if the installer says “I can’t find the MSI source for this”, it doesn't give up like the Windows MSIEXEC installer would do -- it picks up all the Registry Entries by scanning the Registry, and then it picks up all file traces by scanning the filesystem. The result is a 100% complete and total un...

“Code is read a lot more times than it is written.” – Anthony Moore, Framework Design Guidelines 2nd Ed Can’t find Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 to uninstall in Programs And Features, or affter checking “View Installed Updates”? No problem! To uninstall Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 in Windows Vista or in Windows Server 2008, do this: 1.Select and then copy the following command to the Clipboard: FORFILES /P %WINDIR%\servicing\Packages /M Microsoft-Windows-InternetExplorer-8*.mum /c "cmd /c echo Uninstalling package @fname && start /w pkgmgr /up:@fname /norestart" 2. Click Start , and then type cmd.exe in the Start Search box. (If you have Start / Run enabled, just type cmd.exe in the “Run” Textbox). 3.In the list of programs, right-click Cmd.exe , and then click Run as administrator . ( If you are prompted for an administrator password or for confirmation, type the password, or click Continue .) 4.Right-click inside the Administrator: Command Promp...