Difficulty With Uninstall

[oportland]

I cannot get rid of a program called ColorDesk Photo. It is part of a program called Canon Creative 3 installed many years ago, part of which was a greeting card creator, which we recently tried to install and have since removed. It was software bundled with a canon BJ printer, at least ten and perhaps 15 years ago. It shows in my Add or Remove Programs, which will not let me remove it, because it says it is running, although I cannot find it on the hard drive, or in the Task Manager. I have uninstalled everything Canon - scanner, camera, printer with no change. I have run a registry cleaner. I have searched for this in regedit, and while it highlights a couple of keys, they are not identified as Canon related and I am hesitant to remove them. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

 

[cmeagan656]

Have you tried booting into safe mode and seeing if you can remove it from there?

Hope this helps.

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[oportland]

Yes, I have tried unstalling in Safe Mode.

 

[linney]

What is the location of these registry keys you mention? Are they startup (Run) keys?

Is there any information, such as a file location in this area of the registry?

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

Are there any Services relating to this process in Services?


Have you tried this program?

Autoruns for Windows v9.57

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx

Have you tried third party uninstallers such as Revo?

Uninstall Utilities

http://www.snapfiles.com/Freeware/system/fwuninstallers.html

Description of the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301

 

[oportland]

They were not start-up/run keys--at least nothing that showed in MSConfig. I spent the afternoon yesterday combing the registry and found almost ten entries. I don't like doing things this way for obvious reasons. In most cases, the name color or Canon did not appear in the key and I had to check the attributes of each key before deleting. I was then able to uninstall the program using 'Add/Remove Programs'. I have decided not to reinstall the software that came with my Canon printer, for which XP found the driver, or my camera software -- I will use the memory card instead.

Thanks for your suggestions. This forum is very helpful.