Add/Remove programs

Usual problem of a program that no longer exists still appearing in the Add/Remove list.
Easy, I thought - open up HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/....../Uninstall and delete the name. Trouble is, that particular name is not there!! Any suggestions for finding and removing it? I seem to recall I had this problem years ago but I can't remember how I fixed it.

 

Hi Tony,

Have you tried "TweakUI "? Click the Add\Remove tab, click the program that you want to remove, and then click Remove. It worked for me.

This is the exact place you looked for the name of the program (?):
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

Under Uninstall there's a list of {0B459990-etc., etc.}'s. Click each one and see if it's listed there. Sometimes programs aren't listed as their name, but like the number above.

 

Also if you have spybot the advanced tools>uninstall info will allow you to delete this/these.

Be careful though and make sure this is a program that has been cleanly removed using the preferred standard via add/remove. Partial or incomplete uninstalls can cause problems.

 

Thanks for the responses. I had a look at TweakUI but my version doesn't have tabs and there are no references to Add/Remove. Maybe an old version?
I shall try looking at the alphanum strings as suggested.
One other point of interest - I have a program which will search the registry so I tried it with the name of this program and it found 153 references !!! I'm oviously highly dubious about removing all of these. What does anyone think?

 

You might try Super Win Software freebie Add Remove Pro

 

Another excellent suggestion via BBS - thanks Pete. I have run jv16 Power Tools and found the most incredible list of rubbish that shouldn't still be in my registry, and now it's all gone! I have TuneUp Utilities 2008 which I have found to be a very good cleaner BUT it doesn't find what jv16 finds.
This is the usual problem - all cleaner programs find different things but no single cleaner finds everything, so one has to have more than one.

Thanks to everyone who replied.

Joke - Two caterpillars on a leaf watched a butterfly flap past. One caterpillar turned to the other and said 'Well, you'll never get me up in one of those things!'.

 

Hi Tony,

Will you please post back and let us know what you did\used.

 

Reply for jpChris: What I did was to take PeteC's suggestion of jv16PowerTools (downloaded from the web) and installed it. When I ran it I chose Registry Tool (Installed options) from its options and it displayed the names of all the programs that the registry thought were on my system, and it was a matter of checking those items which I definitely knew were not installed (e.g., Nero, which I uninstalled some weeks ago) and clicking Remove. I did the same for Registry Tool (File Types) being more careful here because it's not so easy to recognise what file types shouldn't be there.

And that's about it - I now have a very useful (freeware) cleaner program.

 

Hi Tony,

Thanks. I'd completely forgotten about jv16. I've used it before and it's gotten to the root of several sticky problems in the past.

(by the by, I still haven't amended the .bat file. I've amazed a couple of people by hitting the space bar a couple of times to delete the files. Also, I've customized it and sent it to a few friends. I wasn't kidding about the analogy of a 10 year-old and a new bicycle Thanks, again.)

 

Hi Chris -
An update on the problems. Notwithstanding all my 'cleaning' including jv16 I checked yesterday and the non-existing program was STILL appearing in Add/Remove !! I then had a look directly in the Registry and found that there were still many (at least a dozen) refs to that program. I pondered this for a while and, of course, I was reluctant to simply delete all refs.
However, I noticed that in the 'file extensions' part was the extension solely related to this program. Since this is used by XP purely as a lookup list for relevant actions, I decided as a first approach to delete this ref. Incredibly, on checking again, I found that ALL THE OTHER REFS to this prog. had now disappeared !!!! Amazing !!
This is something definitely worth remebering.

 

Hi Tony,

Just out of curiosity's sake, exactly where did you find the miscreant? Was it in the "{0B459990-etc., etc.}'s" section in HKLM\Uninstall?

- Chris

 

Hi Chris -
No, I wasn't looking in HKLM.

What I was referring to was the list of file extensions (eg, .doc .txt etc.) which appear as the first items listed under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT. As you without doubt already know these are where XP gets its 'open with' list from. The unbelievable thing was, as I said, merely deleting the .xxx extension related to the problem program somehow caused ALL THE OTHER references to the program in all other branches to be removed. I still have no idea how or why, but it did the trick.

Of course, as a solution, this cannot be used UNLESS the extension is relevant solely to that program and to no other. Imagine the chaos if one deleted the .doc extension !!

Tony

 

Oh now you tell me!

Actually, that's how I learned about computers "” by deleting stuff in the registry and everywhere else with W95. Of course the computer broke and I had to fix it; but that's how I learned "” the hard way.

Anyway, thanks for the info.