Add and Remove Programs Duplicate

[ruslan]

Yesterday I was trying to clean some of my programs, and went in to see what was going on with all my installs.

There was 2 instances of Entropia Universe apps inside that window both waiting 4+ gigs, one was dated from August and another one from a cople of days ago (the last update).

So, I went in, removed the oldest one and guess what happened?
The whole Entropia Universe got uninstalled!

Just a word of forewarning: DONT!

 

[Alins]

hehe I got the same problem but I didn't remove it.

 

[endermigne]

That's a general issue with Windows and not EU's fault. One could say is that it's MA's fault as they forgot to do a proper cleanup when distributing a new full installer. I mean they removed the files of the previous version but not the administration information. Though, as you may expect other software might be as lame.

What you see in the Software-section of the control panel is what installers write into the registry at the appropriate place. In other words I could write a program (or actually just a .reg-file) that "installs" 1,000 programs.

What happened here is that both entries in the list pointed to the same uninstaller. So it doesn't matter which of the two you'd have clicked, it would have done the same thing.

Now you probably still have the other entry and you are unable to get rid of it in any way. From what I know the only way is to remove it from the registry. Though, if you have never used the registry you better not even think about running it as you can do lots more harm than useful things.

In Windows 2000 the uninstallers are listed in

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\

it might be somewhere else on other OS-es. Maybe you look for "uninstall" and see if you find the proper entry there?