Programs Cannot Be Uninstalled In Vista?

Corson writes "I am surprised that nobody seems to have mentioned this here yet. Possibly after one of the latest updates in Windows Vista, two strange things happened: first, the Uninstall option is no longer available in the Control Panel when you right-click on older programs (most likely, those installed prior to the update in question, because uninstall works fine for recently installed programs — the Uninstall button is also missing on the toolbar at the top); second, some programs are no longer shown on the applications list in Control Panel (e.g., Yahoo Messenger). A Google search returns quite a few hits on this issue (e.g., one, two, three, and four) but everybody seems to be waiting patiently for a sign from Microsoft. But the company seems to have no clue or they would have fixed it already. I am just curious how many of you are experiencing this nuisance."

Comments

This is why you turn off updates....

[Fallen Kell]

Problems like this happen all the time. This is why companies usually have a vetting process for any updates that are released and why no person should download an update for a week or more for these issues to be brought up and found/fixed. I keep automatic updates turned off ever since an update for Win2k corrupted my installation and forced a full re-install.

Re:This is why you turn off updates....

[jkrise]

companies usually have a vetting process for any updates that are released and why no person should download an update for a week or more for these issues to be brought up and found/fixed. I keep automatic updates turned off ever since an update for Win2k corrupted my installation and forced a full re-install. I'm a bit confused here. Let's say I'm a sysadmin and I have a few 100 PCs in my network, 90% of them running some flavour of Windows - mostly Win2K and WinXP, 6 new Vista PCs for testing and the rest Linux. (actually I'm no longer a sysadmin but the rest of the above scenario applies in my firm).

Should we double-guess what Microsoft tells us in their tech notes, and manually check every single patch? Every patch Tuesday, we get about 8 patches on average, how can any end user co. be expected to test out all these on their production networks? How exactly can sysadmins go about checking all these patches themselves? Does it add to their 'experience' or job value? I don't think so, and the sysads can't be bothered to verify what Microsoft ought to know.

End result - we have a WSUS server which handles all the updates, and that server is set to automatic, sothe sysads get back to their task of configuring new PCs, setting up changed environments based on changing project needs etc.

A separate vetting process and a delay of a week is insane IMO - with zero day attacks and little info. to work on - sysadmins are better off doing Automatic Updates. The other problem here in India is that there is no direct support from Microsoft even for Corporates who are willing to pay - support issues get routed to some VAR, the engineers there know little better than the sysadmins, and often merely pretend to help out. In reality they couldn't be bothered less.

Poor Vista adoption will actually accentuate his problem I guess - the smaller userbase will mean lesser bugs reported until it's too late.

Re:This is why you turn off updates....

[slackmaster2000]

Actually, having just enough staff to keep things running sounds very efficient to me.

Redundant testing of MS patches for the extremely unlikely event of having a patch cause real damage is wasteful. I have had MS patches screw up systems plenty, but the cost of fixing the problem after the fact has actually been considerably less than all the work that would be required putting tests through vague tests of my own design. Consider the bug in the topic post. I wouldn't have caught it, even if I did have time to verify every single patch. What would the procedure be?

4.3.4.594393 (c) Verify that programs still have uninstall button in Add/Remove programs.

Now what I've argued here doesn't apply universally. For desktops in what I consider a typical MS environment, however, the amount of time spent fixing problems caused by patches is so low that I could never, ever justify the cost of in-house testing. I read the patch synopsis and caveats, maybe hold off on scarier ones, do a minor amount of verification, and have very few problems.

Re:I'm not experiencing this at all...

[vertinox]

Because he speaks a bit of truth. If you have supported Vista on the corporate side of things, it is a bit of the spawn of the devil in some regards. Most legacy VPN programs are hosed and countless other products had to go through a whole series of revamping and patching (heck even Outlook Web Access controls are broke on systems using Vista if you don't patch)

Of course most corporate users wouldn't notice thing since most companies are staying away from Vista like the plague but on occasion when a user calls in saying they got a new persona computer from dell and need to VPN or use OLWA or a legacy app... Well...

Office 2007 on the other hand is great, but you can run that on WinXP. No need to upgrade.

Re:Bullshit

[fd0man]

Perhaps you ought to give GNU/Linux systems another try. Perhaps Ubuntu would be your forté, simply because the "esoteric command line stuff," as you put it, isn't really required. There may be some situations wherein a little bit of command line stuff might be required, but these situations are typically more rare than you would think, at least in my experience. It just seems that people that run into these situations are quite loud and rampant with it.

There are many systems that are more tailored for geeks, and then you have Ubuntu and some other systems that are really tailored to end-users. Overall, they're doing a great job with it, and it is getting to be better as time goes on.

Having run both Windows Vista (both the 32-bit and the 64-bit, beta and release versions), I must say that there really is no comparison to Ubuntu. Windows still has many problems that it hasn't really gotten over yet, mostly due to problems that still haunt them from the past, but also because when you install a retail version of Vista, the drivers that you need have to be sought and everything else. Contrasted with Ubuntu, which has drivers for everything on all of the PCs that I manage on my own personal network, and on other systems that I have installed it onto (which at this point exceeds 100). Other distributions of GNU/Linux are more lightweight, but you don't really need to be <em>that</em> lightweight on today's PCs, either: Windows Vista seems to require way more resources than an updated and heavily customized Ubuntu Feisty box running an up-to-date version of Compiz and Emerald.

Here's an experiment for you to run on your own, if you are able to do so: Take a relatively modern PC and a Windows Vista Retail disc and an Ubuntu Feisty disc. Have someone install both of them. To be fair, make sure that it is a computer that has hardware that is supported under both operating systems by either a third party driver or the operating system itself. See which one is easier (and takes less time and black magic) to get working. I'm willing to bet that the outcome will surprise you. I know for sure that the outcome will surprise you on the machine that I have as my primary workstation (a HP Pavilion Slimline s7700n PC). Ubuntu supports the hardware in this system even better than Vista does pre-installed, and runs quite a bit faster (one such example: <em>Guild Wars</em> runs like utter crud on this system under Vista, but runs perfectly under Cedega on Ubuntu. Windows XP runs it better than Vista on this PC, but not as well as I can run it under Ubuntu.

It might be pertinent to do some fact-checking before spouting off next time... but then again, this <em>is</em> Slashdot.

Re:Bullshit

[howlingmadhowie]

as far as i'm concerned, if i'd just spent 200 dollars on the newest and best product from the largest and richest software company in the world i'd expect the thing to fucking well just work and work now.

Re:I'm not experiencing this at all...

[b100dian]

I recently bought a Dell laptop with tons of crap software installed. None of them had the Uninstall button
I solved the problem by replacing that Vista with a clean installed one.

It still puzzles me how they (Dell) did it, but haven't had the time to check it myself.