Have you ever run into the situation where you either were trying to install a piece of software and it failed in the middle or you ran into problems trying to uninstall a program because of corrupted install files?
Well in either case, it causes big problems because you either can’t use the program you want to install or you can’t get rid of a program on your PC. Luckily, Microsoft knows this sort of thing happens quite a bit and therefore released a very useful tool to solve the problem.
Windows Installer Cleanup Utility is a free tool from Microsoft that was originally meant to be used to fix installation problems with Microsoft Office products. However, it’s also a great tool for cleaning up corrupted, deleted or otherwise messed up installations for any program. You can use it to remove programs manually from Windows.
Whenever a new program is installed in Windows, it has to go through the Windows Installer service. This service is used by Windows to register the programs so that they show up in the Start Menu, record other meta information about the program, etc. If you have a partially installed program, Windows Installer may not be able to remove it and because it has partial data about the program, you may not even be able to reinstall it.
The Windows Installer Cleanup Utility will remove the information stored about the program from Windows so that you can run the setup again to either reinstall the program or to properly remove the program. Note that the utility does NOT actually remove the program itself, just the data ABOUT the program.
Even though the program is very simple to use, here’s how it looks:
Just choose the program that you want to cleanup and choose Remove. So if you cannot uninstall Adobe software (which seems to cause a lot of issues), download this tool and remove the Windows Installer data. Enjoy!
This answers the question to my problem (exactly)!