Removing software, or at least, thinking you are

[Picapica]

With the add/remove function in the control panel, I wanted to get rid of Frontpage (express?), Personal Web Server and Publisher98. Lately I've been using Norton SystemWorks and using a function called Cleansweep, which monitors all installations and writes down all changes an installation makes, including registry changes. Which is really handy. But Microsoft stuff was already installed on this computer, before I started using cleansweep. Uninstalling Microsoft programs is never easy, and as far as I can see, never 'complete'; there are always a bunch of directories left, in which often a bunch of files remain.
Q1: Why aren't they gone? Why does the uninstall program remove everything but a handful of stuff?
Q2: Deleting the leftovers, advisable?
Q3: I can see unnecessary directories, but I'm not that good with the registry. So if the uninstall didn't even remove all directories, how many millions of registry entries will it have left there?

Systemworks has a registry cleaner, I use regclean and regcleaner, and all three of them find different faulty and unnecessary entries. Is there a registry cleaner that works more complete?

-thx

[RWSchlatter]

Q1: Why aren't they gone? Why does the uninstall program remove everything but a handful of stuff?

A1. This happens with software from other softare houses too. Mostly the reason is, that user data is saved to the installation directory (rather than eg. the MyDocuments folder). Good deinstaller scripts will leave any directory structure with files they have not originally installed.

Q2: Deleting the leftovers, advisable?

A2. Check thru the left over directory structure of the program install, if you don't see any files you wish to keep, delete it.

Q3: I can see unnecessary directories, but I'm not that good with the registry. So if the uninstall didn't even remove all directories, how many millions of registry entries will it have left there?

Systemworks has a registry cleaner, I use regclean and regcleaner, and all three of them find different faulty and unnecessary entries. Is there a registry cleaner that works more complete?

A3-1. The registry has no actual directories, the keys are only represented by folder cause this is a commonly known visual representation for hierarchical data. If a deinstaller for some reason or other does not remove all registry contents, your registry file will grow over time. This is a known effect.

A3-2. Registry cleaners can go and try to find unused islands of registry data. Generaly speaking the cannot determine what can be removed without problem to your system - they can only show up the keys they consider as left over. The reason why different registry cleaning tools find different result sets is, that there is no predefined rule as how to store data in the registry, so no rules exist to remove it. The different amount of data found by different tools depends on the algorithms used to the search.

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Regards - Richard

[Picapica]

Thanks for the useful information :)

[henryg]

The only utility that would do that is called "NBG clean registry". It takes a while but does the job better that other registry cleaners can't.