When Add/Remove Doesn't Remove

Technorati tags: Uninstaller, XP, bug

What do you do when you go to XP's Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs, find the software you want to remove, and the entry has no Remove button on it?

I found an answer in a forum thread, as follows...

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{Program Name}

If NoRemove is set to 1, the Remove button will be unavailable
If NoModify is set to 1, the Change button will be unavailable

Note that as the {program name} may be a CLSID, you may need to search for the product name (e.g. "Intel Audio Studio", using what you saw in Add/Remove) to locate the correct entry in which to find the relevant NoRemove setting.

Intel Audio Studio

In my case, I'd had to replace a failed Intel 945G chipset motherboard with a new Intel G33 chipset motherboard with attendant processor upgrade.  XP died on a BSoD STOP error on all boots, as expected (a self-serving product fragility that helps limit "license creep") so the next step was to "just" do a repair install... but that's another day's blogging.

The other motherboard came with Intel Audio Studio, which installs and uninstalls along with the sound drivers.  But when the motherboard changes, the old sound device vanishes from Device Manager, so you no longer have an UI from which the device (and thus drivers, and thus associated bundleware) can be removed.

Hence the problem: Add/Remove Programs has an entry for Intel Audio Studio, but that entry has no Remove button.  It "doesn't need it" (so implies the text within the entry) because it is "installed and uninstalled with the drivers".

The meta-bug behind the bug

Alun Jones said "Don't solve problems, solve classes of problems", and by meta-bugs, I mean the classes of problems behind the bugs you step on one by one.

Have you noticed how few USB-interfaced hardware vendors create driver installations that work with the Windows PnP detection, prompt, and install sequence?  Most vendors tell you to avoid that by first auto-running their installation CD or running their Setup.exe, and then plugging in the USB device only after the "drivers" are loaded.

One reason may be because the vendor wants to install a range of software that is broader than that handled by the device driver installation purpose.  And this is where the meta-bug comes in, because whereas drivers are suppressed when the device is not found, the rest of the bundled software is not.  This is what causes your Display Properties dialogs to crash when you replace your graphics card, if the old graphics card left device-specific code hooked into the Properties page.

In this case, the meta-bug caused an apparent inability to uninstall Intel Audio Studio.  With the new motherboard in place, a dialog appears on every boot to the effect that Intel Audio Studio doesn't work with the system's (different) audio, prompting my attempts to uninstall the software via Add/Remove Programs.

What is particularly annoying, is that Intel's web site has nothing I could find on this issue - either via their own site search, or combining www.intel.com with appropriate search terms in a general Internet Google search.

Web Forum Login Blues

Technorati tags: Forums, Web

One of the challenges in web design and web forums in particular, is how to handle the requirement to log in for more functional access.

Whenever a login prompt pops up, folks will often simply leave, rather than log in, even if they are already registered at the site.  So immediate login isn't usually what you want to do with web forums; for one thing, you will lose folks who find your forums via search results that jump into forum content.

So web forums generally let you browse around until you want to do something that requires you to login, such as start new threads, reply to posts, etc.

Even at this point, I'm still inclined to give up rather than continue, when I see a login prompt.  Why?  Because I anticipate a hassle of not only login in, which I can handle, but having to re-navigate my way back to what I was doing - i.e. which forum, which thread, which one of 27 pages of posts (sometimes requiring 22 "next" because there's no "go to end" where the most recent stuff is found) and which post on that page, then the edit box I may have already started.

The Bart forums hosted here get it right; you sign in, and you are returned exactly to context you left before you had to log in.

Microsoft's web reader for their newsgroups gets it wrong, at least in the context of linking to their forums via other Microsoft sites.  Here's the repro; start here...

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie8/welcome/en/default.html

...and then at the bottom right of the page, right-click, Open In New Tab (the method I used, a straight click will likely do the same) on "Community Forums", taking you here:

http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/list/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.internetexplorer.beta&cat=en_us_2BAF8EC5-645C-4477-A380-0F1CF6C102F9&lang=en&cr=us

So far, so good; we're in blah.blah.blah.ie8.blah which is where we want to be, and we start reading, then decide we want to post a new thread.  Oops, now we want to login, so we do, and when we get back, we are no longer in the context of the newsgroup we wanted to visit.  We didn't note the name of that newsgroup because we thought we'd always be able to link into it directly from the IE8 beta page.

Now I know Microsoft are battling to win over many of us usenet die-hards to embrace the web UI to their newsgroups.  This is IMO a serious stumbling block, not only for us, but also for folks discovering newsgroups for the first time, without usenet preconceptions and expectations.

The above is as tested on XP SP2 with IE8 beta 1 installed over IE7, IE8 Standards Mode, set to prompt on active content, all such prompts OK''d.

Workaround 1: Remember what the newsgroup is called, duh!  Not so easy in that it's not content that can be cut and pasted, in terms of the UI, and the nature of the data is a pain to remember.  Breaks the concept of "let the PC do it", too, plus that only gets you back as far as the start of the newsgroup, before you navigated within it.

Workaround 2: Log in, then go back to the IE8 page and repeat the link to the forums (which Microsoft may also refer to as "communities").  This time you will navigate into a logged-in state, and all will be well, though any navigation you did within the forum would have to be re-done.  For best practice (i.e. shouldn't be required, but...) remember to log out of both forum tabs when done.