Loss of Programs in "Unistall a Program"

Hi I'm a newbie to the forum

Been using Win7 for about 4 weeks now and generally impressed. I use it solely for music creation so have a Digital Audio Workstation (Sonar) and many VSTi plug ins.

I tried to install some screen capture software without success and after this (coincidental maybe) I noticed many of the programs have now vanished from the unuinstall list . Where there were 50+ programs available to uninstall I now have about 6!

I have been into regedit to look at where the unistall program reside before this all happened so I can only think something may have happened whilst I was there.

Is there a way of getting a backup of the registry to the point where all the unistall program list used to be?

Are the program still in the program files or have they vanished all together. If they are still there, you can go to their folder in all programs and you will usually find the program uninstaller there. You can go from there if you want to uninstall - that's the same what the windows uninstall will do.
You can also try free Revo (free for 32bit only) and see whether it finds them all.

Btw: this is an excellent screen recorder that I use since a couple of years. It is well worth the $39.95 OTC. You can try the trial version and see for yourself. All videos on my vimeo site were recorded with it. But don't ruin the videos with WMM - use Machete for editing.

whs said:

Are the program still in the program files or have they vanished all together. If they are still there, you can go to their folder in all programs and you will usually find the program uninstaller there. You can go from there if you want to uninstall - that's the same what the windows uninstall will do.
You can also try free Revo (free for 32bit only) and see whether it finds them all.

Btw: this is an excellent screen recorder that I use since a couple of years. It is well worth the $39.95 OTC. You can try the trial version and see for yourself. All videos on my vimeo site were recorded with it. But don't ruin the videos with WMM - use Machete for editing.

All programs are still there and at present I don't want to uninstall them but there may come a time when I do of course

Thanks, I will take a look at your scrren recorder but I think my problem is the M-Audio Audio Interface as I don't use the onboard soundcard at all. Thanks

FZ21Z said:

quietman said:

Is there a way of getting a backup of the registry to the point where all the unistall program list used to be?

Hi.
Hopefully this should help - System Restore

Looked at the system restore options and there are no events for yesterday when this problem occured. I can go back 2 days go 22ndFeb.

If you go back 2 days, make sure you save the work of the last 2 days before you do - newly created documents, bookmarks, etc.

FZ21Z said:

quietman said:

Is there a way of getting a backup of the registry to the point where all the unistall program list used to be?

Hi.
Hopefully this should help - System Restore

It looks like it was sucessfull. All the programs are back in the Uninstalled List. Thanks.

However, I think the article is great BUT there should be a note about Anti-Virus as the system restore failed beacuse an anti-virus program was running. I had 3 attempts after permanently unistalling Norton AV before working out the correct method!

First, I disabled Norton as the error message suggested but of course on re-boot it starts again. I then disable the service but still no luck so I removed it entirely! I'm about to load McAfee now as Norton was only a trial and I have a license for McAfee.

The Norton icons on desktop and in programmed were orphaned after reboot even though the program had been removed.

Thanks again for the advice!

quietman, if you want to uninstall Norton, you must use the Norton Removal Tool - else you get all kinds of unexpected effects. Same for McAfee: you need the MPCR.exe . The normal Windows uninstall is not good enough.

Brink said:

I'm happy to hear that you got it sorted Quietman. I have added a note the the tutorial to help others to prevent that same issue. :)

It didn't quite end there. Where I thought Norton was completly uninstalled, for some reason it was still running as McAfee complained about it and could not remove it. No service was running. I tried physiclly deleting the Norton directory but could not as something was still running in the background.

Anyway, I downloaded again Norton 2010 to get protected again which got round the problem. Long winded, but for the time being I'm up and running again.

I will have to uninstall again and try McAfee once the trial is over which will be interesting!