Removing invalid entries from Add or Remove Programs

Sometimes when you uninstall a program, corresponding entry in the Add or Remove ProgramsAdd or Remove Programs applet, follow these steps: listing may not be removed. This may be due to incomplete uninstall or poorly designed uninstaller itself. To manually remove the orphaned entries from the Click Start, Run and type regedit.exe

• Navigate to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Uninstall

• Backup the branch to a file

Note: Each subkey represents a program that you've installed. To determine which program that each key represents, click the key, and then view the DisplayName value data in the right pane

• Select the subkey that you want to delete
• Right-click on the subkey and choose Delete
• Close Registry Editor

Still unable to remove an entry?

If the program was installed using Windows Installer, then you may use Windows Installer Cleanup Utility to remove the installer information for that program, and also the corresponding entry in Add or Remove programs.