Fully Uninstall a Broken App

Question

Fully Uninstall a Broken App

Anonymous

A bit awkward perhaps... The other day I installed a program (Kid Pix 4 Deluxe) from an abandonware website (My Abandonware)... Now the program was safe (as far as I can tell), and ran as intended, but I ran into some issues in uninstalling it. In my excitement to see the Undo Guy again I ran the wizard without taking a system image beforehand, and now I'm stuck with the ghostly remnants of some of the components added to my system.

In typical fashion, the uninstaller failed to fully clean out the folders and registry keys it created, but that's easy enough to clean up. The bigger issue is the components that seem to be stuck in a kind of limbo. Specifically, two text-to-speech systems ("Microsoft Text-to-Speech Engine 4.0 (English)" and "L&H TTS3000 Español") seem to be "gone" but not quite. The first time I tried uninstalling these, I got a series of errors or warnings, but the process terminated saying it had completed successfully... except the app still showed as installed. Trying to remove them again would return an "Advanced INF Install" error saying it failed to locate a certain INF file (I believe this error also appeared at the end of the sequence during the initial uninstallation, but I could be wrong).

I tried creating dummy INF files in the directory with those names but it didn't work, and I tried reinstalling the main program to see if it could restore the assets so they could be uninstalled properly but it hasn't touched them at all (My guess is it detects them as installed already so doesn't add them back—I did confirm the TTS features in the program aren't functional at this point, though I never tested them during the initial installation to compare).

I also found a huge amount of files in the C:\Windows\Speech directory, all timestamped to 1999. I concluded these were probably related, considering the dates, the fact I don't have any other TTS systems installed, and that the files weren't present on other computers I checked. Unfortunately, wiping these didn't help with the broken apps.

So that's about where I am. I run into this issue both when uninstalling from Settings and from Control Panel. One thing I haven't tried is reinstalling these TTS systems on their own to properly remove them, since I'm afraid they might just make an even bigger mess. I'd like to wipe all traces of this from my system, just to keep it nice and tidy. Thanks.

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Answer 1

Hi André Fertig de Oliveira

Welcome to Microsoft Community.

Based on your description, I understand that you uninstalled the application and found that the registry and folders injected by the application were not deleted, and I understand very well how you feel!

I will give you some solutions that will hopefully solve your problem successfully! However, the first reply may not be able to solve your problem due to the different aspects of this issue, so please understand and provide more information (pictures would be great!) in your reply. Thank you very much!

I have compiled what I believe to be a more complete step-by-step process that you can complete in order:

Remove the residual files of stubborn programs with registry residues by cleaning software.

I personally recommend tools such as CCleaner, IObit Uninstaller, and so on.

These tools can be downloaded and installed from the Microsoft Store.

The link is: 1. CCleaner - Free download and install on Windows | Microsoft Store

IObit Uninstaller 13 - Free download and install on Windows | Microsoft Store

Please note: The above are just some personal recommendations, you can also download them according to your own preferences or current recommendations on the web, but make sure you download a safe and powerful cleanup tool!

Generally speaking, the cleanup tool is still cleaner, but we continue to troubleshoot through the following steps of elimination to ensure the integrity of the deletion.

Please note: 1. Generally speaking, you can finish the stubborn residuals by following my complete steps.

Please be sure to check before deleting to make sure that you are not deleting the wrong content. If necessary, please create a restore point before performing the operation.
Examine the registry residue.

(1) “WIN + R” to open “Run”, enter “regedit” and open the

(2) first backup registry

(3) Search for entries

“Ctrl + F”, search some related keywords, such as ‘Kid pix’, ‘Text-to-Speech’ and so on.

Delete the related entries.

Please note: Be careful and make sure you only delete entries related to these programs.

Delete the residual files.

Navigate to “C:\Program Files”, “C:\Program Files (x86)”, find any folders related to Kid Pix etc. and delete them.

Considering that you found the files in “C:\Windows\Speech”, you can delete them if you are sure that they are related to the uninstalled program.

If you can't delete them in normal mode, we'll try opening the Windows built-in Super Administrator account and logging in in Safe Mode.

(1) Open the built-in administrator account

Click “Windows Logo Key” to open the search bar -> Enter “cmd” in the search bar and open it with administrator privileges -> Please enter the following commands

net user administrator /active:yes

(2) For Safe Mode you can refer to: Windows startup settings - Microsoft Support

Reinstallation and uninstallation of the TTS system
Remove stubborn entries using the command prompt (this was written after my actual research)

Click “Windows Logo Key” to open the search bar -> Type “Windows PowerShell” in the search bar and open it with administrator privileges -> Please enter the following command

Recognize the TTS related driver.

pnputil /enum-drivers

Uninstall

pnputil /remove-driver <oem#.inf> /uninstall

Replace <oem#.inf> with the actual driver name.

After ensuring that everything is deleted, run Disk Cleanup.

Disk Cleanup can help us clean up temporary files.

Click “WIN key” to open the search bar -> type “Disk Cleanup” and open it with administrator privileges -> Clear Temporary Files

Reboot your computer to take effect
Recheck if there are any leftovers

Please note: 1. Generally speaking, you can finish the stubborn residuals by following my complete steps.

Please be sure to check before deleting to make sure that you are not deleting the wrong content. If necessary, please create a restore point before performing the operation.

I sincerely hope that the complete program that I have researched for a long time will help you!

I personally recommend not to install installers from unknown sources in the future, after all, we don't know if the uploader will have private stuff in the installer or not.

I sincerely hope that the above solution will solve your problem. Please feel free to contact me if you have any problems or still can't solve them. (Photos related to the question would be great!).

I look forward to hearing back from you.

Best Regards

Arthur Sheng | Microsoft Community Support Specialist

Answer 2

Thank you for your detailed reply.

Currently, removing the uninstall key and cleaning the registry with CCleaner removes most of the ghost entries. If there are still residuals in the list of applications, or if you want to make sure everything has been removed, you can manually check the registry locations of the installed applications listed below.

WIN + R” to open ‘Run’ -> type ‘regedit’ and open it

the following two paths:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

Check for any keys that match the name of the program or its components and remove them. This helps to remove any residual entries in the list of applications.

If you are deleting registry keys or folders, be sure to back up the registry so that if something else goes wrong after we modify the registry, you can restore from the backed up registry.

What I am more afraid of though is that you come across rogue software that writes hidden scripts and registries, and when we delete the apparent registry and residual files and restart the computer, the scripts run automatically causing the residual content to come back.

If this is the case, reinstalling the system may be a better option to avoid scripts written in the code connected to the virus server or in our use of the process of affecting other applications, or even our computer as a “broiler” to attack other servers or devices.

The term “broiler” is a metaphor, and in the hacking industry we refer to devices that are controlled for no apparent reason as “broilers”.

Finally, I personally recommend that you try not to download and install applications of unknown origin unless you have to. After all, we have no way of knowing if the installation package has been tampered with. Except through some technical means.

Answer 3

Alright, I got bored and decided to try out CCleaner. It was also unable to uninstall the programs but it did give me an option to delete their uninstall keys, and since that's all that seemed to remain of them anyway I figured I'd take a shot. Also used it to scrub the registry up a bit because why not.

It's worked, I guess. I can't say how confident I am about it really (not that it really makes much a difference in practice) but I'll probably find myself in some situation that justifies a reinstallation soon enough anyway so eh.

Answer 4

Hey Arthur. again just to be clear, my main issue is these ghosts that show up in my app list, being pretty much gone already but failing to remove completely.

I've managed to uninstall pretty much everything of substance. I've gone through the File Explorer and registry and wiped out everything I could find. Of course there might be unlabelled things here and there but I couldn't be expected to find those with with a ctrl + F search, could I?

Really I just want to know where the system gets the list of apps so I can fix it manually. Funny enough I did find a registry script used to install the assets which could theoretically be useful for cleaning it out but it's far from human-readable and there isn't any easy way to reverse it as far as I can tell.

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Fully Uninstall a Broken App

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