Total Uninstall question:

I am hoping for a bit (!) of mental fog clearing

I think I dont quite understand some of the TU terminology.

Could someone help me:
-Monitor install with TU "creates snapshot"(got that bit)
-uninstall that app with TU (got that bit)

What I dont grasp is what happens when I do multiple serial installs and each snapshot is changed. Or the registry is changed by me.

How can the "snapshot" per install be utilised if I want to uninstall out of sequence compared to the initial order of installation?

When I have done this before while using the older free/trial versions of TU I used to get warning messages about registry entries that possibly shouldn't be touched.

It could just be the terminological inexactitude of "snapshot" or I have a deep and fundamental misunderstanding of the utility.

I may have asked something like this before, but didn't really get ahelpful (to me) answer.
Any pointers?

Thank you.

 

You should only use the TU to test programs, because if you use it to monitor all the programs that you have installed, when you use the TU to uninstall some program, they will remove all the new registry entries and some folders that has be created after you installed that program.

So you can see the problems that you will have if you do that...

 

Is it possible for a tool to be used that monitors the registry changes and folder/file changes in the system by taking a snapshot for each new installation of software before-during-after the installation, and if uninstalls are done out of order from the installs, to resolve the snapshot information in a database, for instance? Is there any tool that is able to do this? Is the best any known current tool can do - to issue a warning?

-- Tom

 

If a program has created new subkeys or subfolders, then TU 3 will alert on these giving you the option to delete them (though in almost every case, it makes sense to remove them).

As long as you monitor one installation at a time with TU, have it create a fresh snapshot each time and review the changes it flags (to wean out those made by other software running in the background), you are unlikely to encounter problems. The most difficult issue is software that requires a Windows restart since restarts cause lots of changes that need to be weeded out (Windows service start details, Plug and Play enumeration, etc).

As long as you monitor each software install separately with TU, you can uninstall them later in any order you choose.

 

I talking about install a lot of programs.
It's very difficult to determine what keys we should remove or allow to reverse to the previous value, and a lot of programs may already change a lot of registry keys, so it's not advisable...

But this is my opinion...

 

I've found most to be fairly obvious (i.e. key/folder name includes the software or company) - the ones left are CLSID/TypeLib keys which should be unique to an application.

Where you have "common keys" (used by Windows itself or multiple applications), these will virtually always be marked as changed (with a red blob) rather than new additions (yellow asterisk) - more caution is needed here and excluding them if in doubt is a sensible idea.

 

This whole thread kind of disappoints me. I thought TU would be something much more robust than what I see described above. Now it looks like nothing more than just a convenient packaging and interface to something I could do myself with a free registry monitoring tool like REGMON from Sysinternals.

Oh well, such is the case with many programs nowadays.