Can't uninstall program in Vista

Hi,
Nope..I haven't run any registry cleaner before.In fact. I don't have any registry cleaner program installed on my machine. I've been using Vista Disk Cleanup though. Would that cause this problem? At 1st i wasn't sure what can be deleted in Disk Cleanup and I posted a thread here in Cnet asking some of the kind and helpful peoples here on what can be deleted and they said that i could delete most of the files so everytime when i run Disk Cleanup, I've been deleting Downloaded Program Files, Temporary Internet Files, Temporary Files, Thumbnails and also all the Window System Error Archives.

Yea I can find the uninstaller for some of the program such as Window Live Messenger and Limewire. The funny thing is that all the latest program that I installed can be removed or repair in Programs and Features. All the older programs I won't be able to remove from there so its either I look for the uninstaller file in Program Files and delete the folders manually. Is this a common problems in Vista where after a certain period of time I won't be able to remove programs in Programs and Features?
Thanx for replying to my thread,

It's not a common problem, but I ran into a couple cases under Windows XP where the registry entries would seemingly just disappear after restarting the computer...never found an explanation. The best I can say is something caused some of your registry entries to become corrupt/missing. If it happens again with the recently-installed software you might consider backing up your registry (press Windows + R, type in regedit, then go File->Export) and experimenting with running Disk Cleanup and your various programs to see if one of them is causing the corruption.

Good luck.
John

Hey, Thanks for the steps on how to backup my registry. I was actually thinking of tryin to Disk Cleanup again to see what happen to my most recent program.Thanks alot for the help John.

I have the same problem too. Its seems to most often happen with programs designed for XP a couple years ago before programmers started taking the new vista platform into consideration. I would try manually going to the install directory and finding the uninstall file, right clicking on it and running it in compatibility mode for XP

I have the same problem too. Its seems to most often happen with programs designed for XP a couple years ago before . To day I can't find solution yet. In this post I don't understant exactly what I have to do?

John:

Thanks for your post-- It helped me tremendously. I was unable to uninstall a program in Vista previously and there was no solution. I had a computer consultant visit our home and he couldn't fix the problem. I had to resort to a full system reformat.

Erik H.

When a program is installed it generally creates a registry entry with the respective uninstall information, something that didn't change between XP and Vista. Vista names the feature in the Control Panel differently, but it works the same way (accessing those registry entries).

John

I'm trying to reinstall Ubuntu but it wont because it says:
Error executing command
>>command=C:\Windows\System32\bcdedit.exe./delete
{d162b511-3c59-11de-a7a3-00038a000015}/f
>>retval=1
>>stderr=An error occurred while attempting to delete the specified entry.
The system cannot find the file specified.
>>stdout=
For more information, please see the log file:
c:\users\owner\appdata\local\temp\wubi-9.04-rev128.log

Can anyone help me?

Thanks