Having problems getting the betas of Whidbey uninstalled? Use msiinv.exe.

I have installed and uninstalled several sets of bits with .NET.  One thing that I have found INFINITELY valuable is the utility called msiinv.exe.  This utility queries the registry for information about installed packages.  It seems to be a little more accurate than the the windows control panel.  Great, where do you find this utility?  Googling doesn't help much.  I posted it up in the newsgroup microsoft.private.sqlserver2005.setup (don't worry, its actually a publically available newsgroup).  I put it under the post about "Error re-installing SqlServer Express" to assist in problems that this person was having.

You can run it and pipe the outputs to a file.  From this, you can take the product code (it looks like a guid) and run msiexec /x guid.  This will uninstall the offending package.

Wally

2 Comments

  • I get things like this:



    Product code: {29D45189-1851-11D3-8FED-27C34F1DD778}

    Product state: (1) The product is advertised, but not installed.



    0 features.

    0 features are not used.

    0 features are advertised.

    0 features are absent.

    0 features installed to run local.

    0 features installed to run from source.

    0 features installed for default.

    0 features in some other state.

    0 components.

    0 qualified.

    0 permanent.

    0 shared.

    0 patch packages.

  • Glad you found msiinv useful. It uses the MSI APIs directly, rather than going straight to the registry.

    -- matthew
    (Developer of msiinv.exe)

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