Remove entries from the Add/Remove program list

Posted on April 7, 2008 at 5:44 am

The Add/Remove Programs dialog in Windows generally displays every program installed. While this is mainly for your convenience, it can also be troublesome when you want to hide, say an Internet monitoring program to keep an eye on your child’s activities online. In this article, I will be outlining a method of removing specific programs from the list.

Please note that this involves the use of the registry, and things could go seriously wrong unless you know what you’re doing. Go ahead and make a backup of your registry first. But rest assured that if you follow the method outlined below, all will be well.

Press ‘R’ while holding the Windows Key. This will bring up a “run” window. Type “regedit“
Now, you should be looking at the Windows Registry Editor:

Navigate to the following entry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
Now, you should be looking at a rather complicated screen:

Each entry under Uninstall is a list item. But with names like 0A869A65-8C94-4F7C-A5C7-972D3C8CED9E its may see like it is not exactly easy to find out which is which, but all you have to do is click on one of the long keys and in the left pane, look for the “DisplayName” Value.

As you can see, the picture below illustrates a key whose “DisplayValue” is “Safari“, therefore that key corresponds to the entry of the Safari Web Browser that I have installed.

If you scroll down, you will notice that some keys have actual names of programs. This is completely normal, and these too are entries for the respective program.
Now, you can find the program you are looking for. Go through the actual names first, then the long numbers in Curly Braces.
Now crops up the obvious problem. What if at some point of time, you actually want to uninstall the program? We need to preserve the key at another location. To do this, select the key, and click “File” and choose “Export“.
Just choose a location, type in a file name and click save. This creates a .reg file. Whenever you want to uninstall the program, just double-click this file to restore the entry in the Add/Remove dialog box, and then proceed as normal.

Now that we’re done backing it up, all that’s left is to delete it. Just right click on the key and choose delete.

That wraps up the procedure you need to follow. If anything went wrong, you can always restore the keys you edited using the backup.

This is a guest post written by Om J. Bathija, a tech enthusiast and blogger.

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4 Responses to “Remove entries from the Add/Remove program list”

Fantasy said on : April 7th, 2008 at 11:53 am

I read your posts using google reader, which apparently doesn’t support commenting directly. But after i read many of your useful posts, i decided to come here and recognize your for these great articles. TNX.
Meanwhile, how can i find out about an installation process and registry keys being edited or added while a program SETUP? I’m sure u can help me out with this.

akishore said on : April 7th, 2008 at 3:34 pm

Hi Fantasy,

Thank you for the kind comments! I am glad that you enjoy the content.

As for your question, you can monitor registry key changes during the installation of a program using a monitoring application like RegMon:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/system/RegMon.aspx

Let me know if that is what you were talking about. Thanks!

Okko said on : May 21st, 2008 at 7:08 am

Hi,

Interesting post. To answer Fantasy, you can use InstallWatch (http://www.epsilonsquared.com/installwatch.htm) to find out about nearly everything done during an installation.

The tool is pretty easy to use, and very useful

Regards.