Brandon Live!

If you have installed WDS on Windows XP / 2003 and wish to uninstall it, read the instructions below.  Also, please post a comment with your reason for uninstalling - user feedback is very important to all of us.

Standard answer:

1. Click on the Start button
2. Click “Control Panel”
3. Click “Add / Remove Programs”
4. Check the “Show Updates” box
5. Look for “Windows Desktop Search” in the list.

If that doesn’t work:

Try looking for the uninstaller, it normally resides in:

C:\WINDOWS\$NtUninstallKB917013$\spuninst\spuninst.exe

If it’s not there

Then you probably deleted it, or some ill-conceived ”tweak” or “disk cleaner” did.  Unfortunately, this puts you in a tough spot, since it’s really not a supported scenario or something we can design for (”I deleted the uninstaller - now I can’t uninstall!  Help!”).

Your best bet in this case might be to look and see if you have a System Restore point that you can revert back to, from before WDS was installed.  That should remove everything it added to the registry.