How to Uninstall "Difficult" Programs

Reader Tim Ficke asks: Is there a way to uninstall programs if they are not listed under the Add/Remove Programs list? This is on an old Windows 2000 laptop.

This used to be a big problem in the Windows 95/98 days, but it's rarely seen today. Back then, it was actually common for installed programs not to appear in the Add/Remove Programs control panel. To get rid of them you had to dig through your hard drive for the uninstall utility, which may or may not have had a logical name.

To the rescue come "brute force" uninstallers, which will get the job done for you, though perhaps a little crudely. (In other words, don't be surprised if some minor traces of your old programs are left intact. But the program, by and large, should be gone.)

There are myriad brute forcer removers, Uninstall Plus! (pictured above) being one of the better ones I've tried. Uninstall Plus! (free and fully functional for 15 days, $19 to buy) installs easily, and quickly pops up a list of every app installed on your system. I just gave it a spin and found over 300 applications, while Windows reported considerably fewer. To uninstall one (whether it's showing up in Windows properly or not), just click it and hit Uninstall. That's it.

Note that this is different than the problem (also common with older versions of Windows) in which you would remove an application normally, but the app would still show up in the Add/Remove Programs control panel, even after you'd gotten rid of it. This was such a big problem with Windows that Microsoft printed instructions on how to remove the entries by hand. That involves editing the registry, however. There are much easier ways to do the same thing. The easiest? Well, just use Uninstall Plus!, and click the "Delete" button instead of the "Uninstall" button on anything you've actually already deleted. It'll vanish from the programs list after that. Another alternative: The Windows Installer CleanUp Utility, also from Microsoft.