Uninstall ruins windows profile

[dealkema]

My uninstall is trashing the current windows profile. It makes Outlook go non working, for starters. I don't touch the registry outside of HKLM, at least not to my knowledge. A look through the registry shows a lot of entries missing, i.e., only one entry under HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-2684078971-2808853321-2198486663-1005_Classes\CLSID. Other boxes have a lot.

Any idea how I can troubleshoot this? Especially since its so hard to get verbose logging of an uninstall from ARP? The only fix found to date is to create a new Windows profile.

Thanks,
David

[DLee65]

you can bypass ARP and use the command line option

msiexec /x "<path to msi>" /L*c C:\MyVerbose.log

BTW, if you are dealing with a basic MSI installation then checkout the RemoveRegistry table to see if you are deleting anything.

[dealkema]

Thanks - I'll give it a try.

Sorry - I forgot all the good details in my frustration.

1) Basic MSI
2) MS VC merge modules
3) Installs .NET 2.0 and J# 2.0

The only thing I can see interesting is that I'm installing a screensaver. As a part of this I modify System.ini.

-- David

[MichaelU]

Things like this often come from COM extraction of an unideal component. Check your registry table in the built MSI for anything that looks unsavory. For a stop-gap fix, you can COM extract that component before build and remove any undesirable entries. The filtering capabilities added in 12 can also help with this, and will allow you to still use COM extract at build.