Remove TweakUI
Have you ever tried to remove the Tweak UI Powertoy from Windows NT? Under Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel, it's listed there, but sometimes an "Uninstaller Error" occurs which essentially means that you can't remove it!
Why would anyone want to remove such a cute little utility? Because it's caused its fair share of problems in some installations, for one, including weird error message on startup, garbled icon display (especially under Internet Explorer), and so forth.
If the Add/Remove program doesn't work, a peek at the program's uninstall string in the Uninstall sub-key of the Registry should tell you what the problem is.
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HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Uninstall \TweakUI
| In general, when a program won't uninstall using the Add/Remove applet, it's usually due to an error in the uninstall string. The most common error is the lack of "double quotes" around pathnames and filenames with spaces in them. Thus, simply adding the required double-quotes directly to the Registry's uninstall string for that application should render the application uninstallable. |
When I checked mine, the data value for its "Uninstall String" was this:
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"C:\WINNT\rundll32.exe syssetup.dll,SetupInfObjectInstallAction DefaultUninstall 4 C:\WINNT\Inf\Tweakui.Inf"
Well indeedy, this command was wrong, as the file "rundll32.exe" resides in the \system32 folder, not \winnt.
In effect, correcting that path in that Registry string makes the Add/Remove feature work just fine!
(You can also simply paste such uninstall strings directly into the Run dialog or the command prompt to run the uninstall).
Now if that's not the problem, then you must...
Manually Remove TweakUI
First of all, all Tweak UI consists merely of a pretty interface (the Control Panel applet, TWEAKUI.CPL) for changing Registry settings; an installation file (TWEAKUI.INF), and some help files, so if worse comes to worst, you can manually remove all "tweakui.*" files from your systemroot directory and sub-directories with:
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cd c:\winnt
del /q /s tweakui.*
Then run RegClean (preferably the latest version, referred to in the January 13, 1998 article Performance - Hard Disk Drives) as per Cleaning the Registry.
Note that TweakUI is simply an interface to your Registry: getting rid of TweakUI will not restore your old settings, or in any way change your current settings (unless you reset them all before removing TweakUI).
The LATEST TweakUI
You can get the "official" version of Tweak UI [1.1] from Microsoft's Power Toys Download Site.
But I copped the newer Win98 version from the newsgroups some time ago (it's an 88K zipped file), and possibly other sources by the time you read this. And the readme file for this new TweakUI is here.
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