The WIndows Installer Cleanup Utility

Today I ran across a utility that I had never seen before, and I just had to tell you about it. Before I do though, let me give you a little background.

I have a Windows 2008 server that is running Hyper-V. Right now that server is hosting a bunch of lab machines that I am using to produce a training video on Exchange 2007. To make a long story short, I had a power failure last night and it caused the registry on one of my Exchange servers to become corrupted.

I was able to repair Windows and get it to boot, but there was a problem with the .NET framework that caused my Exchange services to fail to start. Because of the damage that had occurred, I couldn’t uninstall the .NET framework, but I wasn’t able to reinstall a fresh copy either because the installer was convinced that a fully functional copy was already installed.

During my quest to manually uninstall the .NET Framework, I found a Windows utility called the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility. This simple utility removes applications from the list of applications that are installed on a server. That way, if you have to remove something manually then the Windows Control Panel won’t keep showing the application even after you have removed it.

You can download this utility from: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301