Kevin's Watch

Here's one for the techies:

Scenario: Was installing Office2000 on a machine this weekend. The installation hung about 2/3 of the way through. Restarted, and (foolishly), manually deleted the files that it had installed.

Tried to re-install, and couldn't. Program list shows Office, but won't let me remove it, because it's not installed.

Then, tried to install another prog that uses the same msiex installer, to be told that it couldn't install, as there was an installation in progress. Thing is, I can't convince the damn machine that the installation has stopped.

Where has it written that info to? The registry? The memory? Is there any way to clear it without deleting Windows, (ME) and reinstalling everything from scratch again?

I ended up installing office '97 on it temporarily, and that worked fine. (Different installer I assumed.) Any way round this guys?

Thanks.

--Avatar

It could be the registry - the installer will have been writing to it before it froze, and if you just deleted the files, registry changes will still be there. You could try a program that checks for registry issues - I use one called CCleaner (mostly to get rid of leftover bits when I uninstall something).
www.ccleaner.com/
If you use this, you just go into 'issues' and 'scan for issues', have a look at what comes up and fix them (it lets you back up the registry before it makes changes).

Thanks Murrin, I'll download it and give it a try. I did search the Reg for any keys that included MSOffice and manually deleted those, but if it's (as I suspect) the installer itself, rather than what it was installing, they'd be called something different.

My other thought is that it might be a general protection fault, where the installer wrote to a specific memory address, which was corrupted by the "hang," and now anything else that tries to use that address generates a failure...

Anyway, thanks. Will try the cleaner out and see if it works.

--A

You could also try something like the uninstaller that comes with Norton Cleansweep - you just point it to the main exe and it takes out all registry keys and files associated exclusively with that program.

If you can't lay your hands on Cleansweep, I'm sure there are other 'uninstaller' programs that do the same thing.

Problem is, the program is gone. That is, none of the files associated with it are on the drive anymore.

Will have a look for "uninstallers" though, thanks for the suggestion. It's all gonna have to wait for the weekend though. (Which I'm not actually worried about. Sick of that damn machine. )

--A