Add Or Remove Programs Washed Out

December 15, 2007 1:39 PM

I seemingly lost a bunch of programs from the Add/Remove programs list. Some programs are still listed, but many of them are gone. There are some programs I would like to uninstall (like Y! Messenger for example), but they're not listed in the Add/Remove Programs list nor do they have an uninstall option. What can I do? I'm running Windows XP
posted by JackO23 to computers & internet (16 comments total)

You can look in the program install directories to see if there's an uninstall.exe, or unwise.exe, or something like that. Alternately, you can reinstall the unwanted application right over the top of your existing install (meaning:without uninstalling first), which may either re-add the app to the add/remove programs list or even give you the option of uninstalling it outright.
posted by deadmessenger at 1:57 PM on December 15, 2007

I have the same problem. I can get some of the "missing" programs to show up if I sort by frequency of use (or last used, whatever it is), but it still doesn't display all of them. Curiously following thread....
posted by yoga at 3:01 PM on December 15, 2007

Something I've seen fairly often are large white spaces between applications lists. Be sure you scroll all the way down with the scroll bar to make sure this is not happening.

Also: Try REVO.
posted by tcv at 3:28 PM on December 15, 2007 [1 favorite]

I should have mentioned, if you have these white spaces, then can be removed, but I've had to do it by finding what entries in the registry are causing them. It's not very safe.
posted by tcv at 3:30 PM on December 15, 2007

My usual trick for this is to download the program again (even a newer version usually works fine), install it, then uninstall it. The new installer usually puts all the uninstall links back.
posted by CrayDrygu at 3:41 PM on December 15, 2007

While there are ways to fix this problem, you are eventually going to have to reinstall XP. Back up your data before it gets to that point.

This is likely just a symptom of a greater problem. Sorry.
posted by bh at 3:48 PM on December 15, 2007

I recently saw this on a customer's machine, along with failed wireless and a bunch of other stuff like being unable to run anything via a shortcut (including the shortcuts in the Start menu, annoyingly enough) and it was caused by fairly massive registry corruption. No single registry key was set wrong - there were just great bunches of keys missing.

After doing a full image backup of the entire hard disk, I used System Restore to roll back to the last checkpoint made before the problem happened, and all was magically fixed.

I cannot in all conscience recommend doing System Restore on a damaged system unless you have either a full backup you can use to get back to where you are now, or it's your last desperate option before doing a full reinstall and reconfigure. In my experience, there's about a one in three chance of having System Restore actually fix something instead of break it even worse.
posted by flabdablet at 4:53 PM on December 15, 2007

What about using one of those registry fixers? Could the problem be a corrupted registry or least a problem with the registry? If a registry fixer is worth a try, which one do you recommend? I googled "registry fixer" and got like a zillion hits. Thanks.
posted by JackO23 at 5:57 PM on December 15, 2007

On the machine I saw, the problem was not that certain registry keys had the wrong values - it was that great slabs of keys had entirely gone missing (including the ones that define what appears in the Add/Remove Programs window). Those registry fixers are designed to remove registry entries that refer to stuff that isn't there any more, and I strongly doubt that any of them could magically reconstruct keys that had disappeared.

It's almost certain to be a registry problem, but really, a registry fixer app has even less chance of fixing it than System Restore does (when it works, SR actually replaces the whole registry with a backup copy).
posted by flabdablet at 6:08 PM on December 15, 2007

Revo is good, or you can use the Microsoft MSI cleanup utility (if the software use the MSI installer). It seems fairly thorough, but just make sure you only uninstall one thing at a time - if you accidentally select > 1 thing, it'll happily remove all selections without pausing in between.

Sometimes, if you just double-click the uninst.exe or uninstall.exe (or similarly named .exe) in theh program's folder, uninst.exe etc will pick up the installation information that usually gets written to the program's folder, and will offer to uninstall it for you.

For registry cleaners, try CCleaner.
posted by flutable at 6:13 PM on December 15, 2007

Your mention of Y! Messenger triggered another memory, too. I worked on another machine whose Add/Remove Programs registry key (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall) was completely destroyed by either a Yahoo Messenger or Yahoo Toolbar uninstall (can't remember which, sorry). It did actually uninstall the Yahoo product along the way, just trashed the registry in the process.

To fix that one, I worked as follows:

1. Image backup the entire disk.

2. Use System Restore to roll the system back to the last checkpoint before the Yahoo uninstall.

3. Use regedit to export HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall as uninstall.reg on my thumb drive.

4. Restore the machine from the image backup.

5. Double-click on uninstall.reg to merge the recovered Uninstall key back into the registry.

6. Use regedit to remove the Yahoo product entries from the Uninstall key, since the Yahoo product is in fact no longer installed.

In theory, I could probably have used System Restore's Undo feature instead of step 4, but I really don't trust SR to do the right thing.
posted by flabdablet at 6:20 PM on December 15, 2007

Here's Microsoft's knowledge base entry on the Uninstall key.
posted by flabdablet at 6:22 PM on December 15, 2007

CCleaner's "scan for issues" tool is good at removing broken keys, but will absolutely not re-invent missing ones.
posted by flabdablet at 6:23 PM on December 15, 2007

Happened to me a couple of months ago--pretty much everything that should have an uninstall entry in add/remove programs is gone. They should all appear in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\; I checked and they were MIA there also.

I export the registry once a week and do a full Ghost image of the C: drive every two weeks. I first tried restoring the registry I saved most recently before this happened. That put most of the right things back but I was still missing a few entries for programs I'm certain were installed before this version of the registry was saved. That made me suspicious that there was more registry damage, and earlier, and I just hadn't found it yet. So I bit the bullet and restored a two-week-old Ghost image and just manually re-did all the changes I had made since creating that image. That solved the problem completely. Obviously that won't help you if you don't have that kind of backup. Sorry. Quick, copy all your important data to other media, fdisk the C: drive (and probably run the manufacturer's hardware diagnostic on that drive also. Device Manager will tell you what kind of drive it is, and you can probably find a disk dignostic on that vendor's website); reinstall XP; reinstall software; replace data. Not what you wanted to hear, I know.)

As for why it happened, the registry is both critical (it better be working right if windows itself is going to work right) and dynamic (both windows and your other software add stuff to it and delete stuff from it all the time.) There are all kinds of opportunities for this to go wrong, even if you don't ever mess arounf with it by hand. And I, fool that I am, do that pretty often.
posted by jfuller at 6:31 PM on December 15, 2007

P.S. for anybody who doesn't want to spend money on Ghost, a free drive imager called Driveimage XML has been dead reliable for me so far. Conveniently, it comes already installed on the equally free (and wonderful) Ultimate Boot CD for Windows.
posted by jfuller at 6:53 PM on December 15, 2007 [1 favorite]

Yeah, spending up big on Ghost is totally not necessary. Even the much-derided inbuilt Windows Backup can make as thorough a backup as Ghost makes (tell it to back up all local hard drives plus system state). Restoring a complete system from such a backup does involve doing a minimal Windows install first, in order to have a running system to run the restore inside, but it does work. Windows Backup can also do something called Advanced System Recovery, which does all the above plus creating a floppy disk that holds details about how your hard disks are partitioned. Using an ASR backup and floppy in conjunction with the Windows Setup CD-ROM, you can do a complete recovery of a backed-up system onto a totally bare hard disk. This works. I've done it.

For my own image backup needs, I rely on command-line-based Linux tools, but that's mainly because I'm totally comfortable with a command line environment and enjoy the degree of control I get by using one and the improved speed of a block-for-block backup compared to a file-by-file one. Block-for-block backups are also good for taking copies of corrupted filesystems before attempting to repair them, guaranteeing that you'll never be worse off than you were before you started; Ghost and Windows Backup both rely on the integrity of the file system they're backing up.
posted by flabdablet at 8:29 PM on December 15, 2007 [1 favorite]