[friedlandim]

Hi folks,

Just obtained a new HP computer a week ago, with Vista Home Premium. One of the legacy programs I tried to install -- Palm Desktop for Sony Clie PDA -- seemed to install ok, but after several days of pain, I could not get the Clie and computer to talk to one another. So, I tried to uninstall the software using the Control Panel > Program & Features (install/uninstall in XP and before), but received an error message, and the uninstall routine then terminates.

I called HP tech support, and their only suggestion was to reinstall all original operating software to it's newly delivered state -- i.e., the equivalent of the old "you need to reformat your hard drive and start from scratch" which I don't accept.

I can't go back to a restore point, as there are a bunch of other things I've installed and tweaked since the Palm Desktop install (while I was playing around and trying to get it to work over several day).

Any suggestions on how to delete the software and clean up the Registry in a safe manner?

[Elvandil]

See if there is an install.log file or something similar (uninstall.dat, etc.) in the program's folder. If there is, open it in Notepad. See if you can find out where the program put its various files. If you can track them down and remove them, you can then try to remove the program from the registry.

Was there a readable error message? Have you tried uninstalling in Safe Mode?

[friedlandim]

The Safe Mode option worked like a dream. Quick, and it took care of the problem. Really makes me wonder just how poor the rest of HP tech support is (and the folks I was talking to were supposedly the Vista OEM tech support experts.

Thanks so much.

[Elvandil]

Glad it was so easy. It's the easy things that don't readily come to mind, sometimes.

You can mark your own threads "solved" in the Thread Tools above. We'd prefer that the person who started the thread do it to avoid any misunderstandings about that person's satisfaction with the solution.