Recently, I came across an article by Lance Whitney on TechNet entitled “Utility Spotlight: Windows Installer CleanUp Utility” that might be worth a visit for those interested in that tool. Also, my colleague and occasional co-author Toby Digby–who works with me on the informative and eclectic Vizta View website–recently contacted me to share hispositive experiences in working with the for-a-fee Total Uninstall 5 product.

What this $40 program (that’s for up to 4 computers, a single computer license costs $30) does that Revo Uninstaller does not do is to detect and remove invalid or partial/failed installs and remove them on your behalf. In fact, as long as the program is installed and monitoriing your system when this occurs, it can reverse complete or partial installs with ease. It can also survey your system and detect already-installed applications, and assist with their removal as well. It uses a TripWire-like before and after snapshotting mechanism to document what apps do when they install themselves (the graphical tree this program creates to illustrate those changes is almost worth the price of admission all by itself), including all new or changed Registry items and filesystem entries.

If you’re in the market for Vista uninstall utilities, you might want to add Total Install 5 to your short list of items worth checking out, in other words. You won’t be sorry you did.

What to do when applications leave detritus behind? This can include orphaned icons, orphaned file associations, files and folders in the %SystemDrive%\Program Files folder, and all kinds of odd and interesting leftovers in the Windows registry. Occasionally, you may even finder helper or support applications left behind (such as various types of viewers, players, or other software the program uses to display certain files, but may not remove from your system even though it cleans up its own code quite nicely), and so forth. The answer to this dilemma depends on which installer the program uses, and what kinds of tools you’ve got at your disposal.

Let me mention two particular items of interest in this context:

• Revo Uninstaller
  A free, handy, and quite usable tool that even offers various levels of post-vendor-uninstall-cleanup for you to choose. Basically, you use this tool to launch a program’s built-in uninstaller from inside this program. Revo Uninstaller watches what that program does, then checks the file system and the registry for you to remove additional remaining traces after the built-in program does its job. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now, and it’s a capable and well-maintained tool (they post updates on a regular basis, sometimes as often as once or twice a month). Grab it at www.revouninstaller.com. For a more complete review of this tool see my recent article “Should Software Makers Clean Up After Themselves?“
• Windows Installer Cleanup Utility
  This tool comes from Microsoft, the same folks who created the Windows Installer, and the most likely party to use this tool for installing software (though you do find a fair number of third-party utilities that do likewise). It only works with programs that use the Windows Installer to install themselves, but it is able to clean up after incomplete or failed installs that originate with that tool. MS Help and Support provides information about and access to this tool in their “Description of the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility” article (KB290301). Please note that this tool will not clean up mangled Microsoft Office 2007 installs, and if the Windows registry’s Windows Installer configuration management data gets munged, you may be likewise out of luck.

If you run into problems or issues with these tools, there are plenty of commercial uninstaller programs that work on Vista. Fortunately for my own Vista machines, I’ve yet to encounter an uninstall problem that one or the other of these tools can’t handle. That said, if you have any experience or favorites you’d like to share, please post a comment to this blog and let us all know. I’ll keep an eye out, and review such items as attract glowing mention and my own fancy.