My nephew just gave me a PC game, American McGee’s Alice (never heared of it before - it’s one of those repackaged, out-of-date, super cheapo games) and it’s causing me problems.
After installing it wouldn’t run (did not recognize CD). I uninstalled (seemed OK) and then re-installed but no dice. Uninstalled again and started installation a third time. Something went amiss and the installation crashed part way through.
Now I am stuck. If I run the un-installer it reports success, but nothing changes. If I run setup.exe I get 3 choices: Modify, Repair and Remove. All three options report success but do nothing.
How can I rid myself of this piece of crap? I hate having things come up on the Add/Remove list which don’t work.
Well you might search for a support forum for that game online, perhaps at the publisher’s website. There may be a patch that fixes it all right.
But assuming there’s not, then set a restore point,then go and wipe the program directory itself, use Eraser or another wiping program so the files are really gone. Then reboot, go to the Add/Remove programs thing again and it will be there–click on it, and Windows will say that “It cannot locate this program” and it will then ask you if you want to remove it from the list. Click yes, and it’s all gone.
Also you could go through the registry and search for and delete any entries that contain the name of the main program executable, or that refer to the game program’s directory (I would do this first, because you need to know the game name and directory to do it). If the folder only contains information on that program, you can delete the whole folder. You can leave the “system informational” entries such as “lastprograminstalled” or “lastDirectXregistered”.
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if you havent done much since you first installed the program you can just run system restore to a time before the game was installed and any changes it made to the system will be undone. You will still need to manually search the hard drive to remove the files, but all references to the game in the windows reg. should then be gone.
If you are familiar with the registry, you can do it, but you can do a lot of damage, so be careful. Make a system restore point before proceding.
The key you are looking for is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
Do not delete the above key! Under this key, will be a sub key for every package in the add remove program list. All you have to do is locate the one for Alice - it may be by product ID or by package name - and delete that key. The package will eventually disappear from Add/Remove programs. This DOES NOT remove the program, just the Add/Remove program option. There is another key that works with this one
In the registry, you should also check
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\whaever for EA or AMERICAN MCGEE or whoever the publisher is. This key will have system specific software settings. Should be deleted also.
Finally, you will have to manually delete the installation directory if you want to free up the disk space. If you installed to the default directory, go to C:\Program Files\EA\Alice or whatever and start deleting. Good luck.
Please note: I assume you never want to play it again - deleting the above keys will make it not show up for all intents, but does not “clean out the registry” there are other keys that modify the Add/Remove programs, but for simplicities sake, we just want it gone.
