Removing software that refuses to go away

Submitted by Paul Ryan on Wed, 02/16/2011 - 16:13

Today I tried to uninstall an evaluation version of Microsoft's SQL Management Studio.  The only problem was it refused to go away, it did not even appear in my list of installed programs.  This old tip saved the day for me...

  1. Open regedit and go to HKLM\software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall and click on Edit Find (ctrl -F) to find the name of the app you are looking for.
  2. copy the GUID (long string in left hand pane) for the app.  This will  look like {4AB6A079-178B-4144-B21F-4D1AE71666A2}
  3. open a command prompt and type msiexec /x {GUID} /log [drive]\uninstall.log where {GUID} is the string pasted in step 2
  4. this should kick off the uninstall sequence and remove your rogue application
  5. if this does not work retrieve your log file from  [drive]\uninstall.log and have a look at the output.  If you cannot make sense of it, Google the error or head to one of the tech forums for more help.  stackoverflow.com is my personal favourite at the moment, I have got some good results there recently