I recently ran into a problem on my machine where my installation of Office 2007 became corrupted. As a result, I was not able to repair or uninstall it from the Add/Remove programs menu. Instead of giving up and going through the major hassle of reinstalling everything, I came across a more elegant (and much faster) solution: The Windows Installer Cleanup Utility.

This utility simply “tricks” your computer into thinking a program is no longer installed on your computer, so you can then go back and reinstall it. In my case, it worked perfectly as after the “reinstall” I didn’t have to activate my copy of Office 2007 again.

Usage is simple enough, just install the program and then run it. You are presented with a list of all programs which were installed using the Windows Installer Service and you just select which ones to delete the installation information for. Once you have done this, you should be able to reinstall the program with no problems.

I ran across a very interesting read today, an article titled “The Case of the System Process CPU Spikes“. What made this an interesting read was not so much the article content (although I thought it was very informative), rather the methodology used by the author.

In a nutshell, the article walks through the problem (a continuous CPU spike) as well as how the author proceeded to troubleshoot the issue. He used several freely available Microsoft tools to diagnose the problem which turned out to be a network driver.

Regardless of whether or not the subject matter is applicable to you, I think the process used is something we can all take from this. Virtually any problem can be solved by thinking logically and using the right tools.

One problem I ran into recently required me to uninstall my existing .NET Framework and reinstall. No big deal, so I thought. When I went to uninstall .NET, it immediately errors out. I restart the computer, same problem.

Well, this frustrating problem was easily solved with the .NET Cleanup Utility. Simply put, this utility forcefully removes your existing .NET installations so you can reinstall them. Make sure you heed the author’s warning through:

1. This tool is designed as a last resort for cases where install, uninstall or repair did not succeed for unusual reasons.  It is not intended as a substitute for the standard uninstall procedure.  You should try to perform an uninstall from Add/Remove Programs before using this cleanup tool.
2. This cleanup tool will delete shared files and registry keys used by other versions of the .NET Framework.  If you run the cleanup tool, you will need to perform a repair or reinstall for all other versions of the .NET Framework that are on your computer to get them to work correctly afterwards.

This is a great tool to keep handy for those problem PC’s which might be having the same problem I was.