I got too uninstall-happy

Hey guys,

I'm going to college in a few weeks and as some of you may know I recently bought a desktop computer for my dorm. I've got that completely taken care of and I'll use that for a combination of work and games, but I'd like to use my old laptop as a completely work oriented machine. I recently installed MS Office Ultimate after having some trouble with the file I downloaded via Microsoft and Digital River's "Ultimate Steal" offer. I cleaned out my registry and stuff and then the installation of MS Office went flawlessly.

Cleaning out my registry gave me the idea to just go on a massive uninstall binge so that the only programs remaining on my laptop would be MS Office Ultimate, iTunes, some sort of web browser and maybe a few maintenance utilities so that I have no games to distract me and nothing to slow down my computer when I'm using it for work.

So yesterday I decided to start unstalling things and everything was going just fine until I started to uninstall Adobe Photoshop CS3 and the Sony Ericsson PC Suit I have on my computer so I can transfer pictures and music back and forth. I actually UNINSTALLED Photoshop without a hitch but when I looked on the external hard drive that it had been installed on (I wanted to wipe the HD clean) I saw there were still a few Adobe files left and when I tried to delete them I got an error message saying that deleting these files may cause some programs to stop working. I thought the only programs that would be affected were adobe programs like Image Ready and Photo Stock, etc. so I paid it no heed and deleted the files anyway. Then I moved onto uninstalling the Sony Ericsson PC suit which worked fine up until the end at which point a driver error message popped up that reappeared whenever I tried to exit it. I had to force-shut-down my laptop and when I booted up everything seemed to be fine, except for the fact that when I ran MS Word it came up with a window telling me it had to "configure the necessary files", which it now does every time I run it, and all the text on my computer is italicized.

To try and fix the issue I loaded a system restore point, which didn't really fix anything so I tried loaded an even earlier one, which to my knowledge hasn't fixed the issue yet either. Now there are programs on my add/remove software list that should already be uninstalled and don't react when I click the "remove" button, MS Word still configures whenever it launches (which it didn't do before), and all the text on my computer is still italicized. I thought the system restore would bring back whatever files I shouldn't have deleted but I guess I made a bigger booboo than I had originally suspected.

Please, help!

Have you tried reinstalling photoshop?

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Hi Downloaded! I've not been around so I've not welcomed you to the forum yet so welcome!

From my experience, System Restore rarely (if ever) restores deleted files. What it does is usually restore to earlier settings, which could possibly create even more conflicts even certain key files are already gone.

If the programs that you've uninstalled reappear, try to uninstall them again (usually works for me). Or you can try using the Microsoft Uninstaller cleanup utility. I've downloaded it once and it works pretty good.

I've found a link to it, but I've not re-downloaded this to test if it's the right one so if it's not just tell me and I'll go google hunting a bit more.

Description of the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility

Also, I'm not sure about your current computer set-up but what I usually do if I've done a major screw up is I'd do a clean format. I've my laptop partitioned in such a way that reformatting comes easily.

If your desktop holds most of your vital files, doing a complete reformat of your laptop would be in my opinion the best way to go. That way you can start with a clean slate and when you need to optimize your OS the DAL guys here can help you do so safely.

Out of curiosity though, are you running XP, Vista or Win7?

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I'm currently running a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop with Wiindows XP 32-bit and I haven't built my desktop yet so what I was hoping to do was wipe the external HD's I have hooked up to my laptop so I could use them for my desktop when I get to the states and build it. I managed to fix most of the problems I listed above and I now understand that system restores rarely do much to help a situation other than simply restoring system settings. It's a little frustrating but I guess it makes sense. I fixed my italicization problem by opening the "ariel" .tff file in C:/WINDOWS/Fonts. Google told me that would work. I managed to stop Office from configuring at startup by running a registry cleaner and then entering a registry command I found online supplied by a supposed MS employee and now Office starts without a hitch. My add/remove programs list is still fairly messed up though... Some programs removed themselves but others refuse to go. I decided to do something stupid and manually delete the files because the registry entries had been deleted by the uninstalls. I manually deleted a few registry keys (I made sure they were the right ones) but several programs that don't technically exist on my computer anymore still show up on my add/remove programs list. I have no doubt that my system is probably a little screwed up in ways I can't possibly understand but I'm not entirely sure I actually have a copy of windows I can do a reformat with... It came installed on my laptop when I bought it.

[EDIT]

Thanks for the warm welcome, btw .