Thanks raloop for your comments. I admit, I have had mostly good luck with Comodo Programs Manager but it seems they have abandoned development of it, and it has a few bugs. So I started looking to alternatives and they are relatively complicated (by a ROM IMO) by comparison to CPM to be sure. The Revo user guide boggles the mind, for example. Anyway I appreciate yr post.
ROM: Rough Order of Magnitude (ten times, or 10x)
Sorry; a (very old) carryover from my college physics daze. :)
Running an install monitor may be good if the type of software is notorious for leaving stuff behind on uninstall. For example, av programs and software that you have to search the web to find a "removal tool" for. But the uninstall monitor is going to use some type of "diff" scheme to put your files and registry back how they were. Therefore, the longer the gap between when the software is installed and it is removed, the more changes that are made by other programs. When you then run the uninstaller, there's a chance it's going to hose some settings you wanted to keep because they were made by something you installed later.
There's no such thing as perfection. Closest you might come is if you perform a monitored install, then don't install anything else until you decide to keep or remove the suspect software. Similar thing is restoring from a system snap shot. You removed the offending software by restoring, but also every other software that was installed in the interim. Also any customizations made under shared registry keys may be lost.
Some safeguards help, like using ERUNT to back up the registry, restore points, system image backup. But there is no panacea.
Your thoughtful post summarizes well the concerns that I had. Honestly I was hoping someone would come-in here and say "thus-and-such software can isolate the installation process of a program by this-or-that methodology" thereby avoiding problems of un-doing other software or Windows programs that were running within the particular installer's "window".
Thanks MA, I'll instead continue to be very wary of Uninstallers...
To be honest I kind of gave up using them myself. If I'm unsure about an app I'm going to install then I make a restore point and make a fresh save with ERUNT. That way I can restore the registry separately of using a Restore Point.
That's pretty much the way I do it too. I think it's probably the most effective method for doing an uninstall. I try and make the determination as soon as I can, that way if I do decide to uninstall a system restore or registry restore has minimal affect on other "changes" that have been made in that time that I actually want to keep. If I do the restore soon enough I can remember the other changes I've made and can rather easily reapply them.
Never used any uninstallers myself, but I have heard a lot of good things about Revo.
I just make regular System Restore points and Create System Images on a Regular basis too.
Not an uninstaller but one utility you can use to see what changes an install makes is RegShot:
regshot | Free System Administration software downloads at SourceForge.net
I do also really like Restore Points (tho I'd not heard of ERUNT) and keep detailied diaries for my PCs so if I have to restore I know everything I'll have to re-do to get current again. But some machines I fiddle with a lot over a period of months, hence an interest in "quality un-installs".
I'd not heard of RegShot before either, will have to take a look at it & ERUNT thanks.
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