Brandon Paddock's Blog - Desktop Search and more » Blog Archive

FAQ: How do I uninstall WDS?

July 23, 2007 at 9:22 pm
Desktop Search, WDS FAQ

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:

Click on the Start button
Click “Control Panel”
Click “Add / Remove Programs”
Check the “Show Updates” box
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.

Link

2 Responses to “FAQ: How do I uninstall WDS?”

Tony Says:
November 1st, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Hi,

Regarding uninstalling WDS: We have users that frequently search for numerical data in an excel file (asset numbers, budget numbers). Before installing WDS, we could right click on a folder, select search, enter in a number in the ’search for text in file’ and have the resulting spreadsheets returned. After installing WDS this didn’t work. Then, we uninstalled WDS and it *still* doesn’t work. We really need this functionality back, can you help?

Tony
mathias Says:
April 22nd, 2008 at 10:50 pm
I feel like such a fool for deleting the uninstraller. Of course I’ having trouble getting WS4 preview to work when the old version can not be proberly removed. I guess I’ll just have to pray that the final realease of WS4 will at least be able to owerwrite the existing version of WDS3.

thanks for the tip!

Hi. I'm Brandon. I'm a geek, and I work on Search technology for Windows at Microsoft. This is my blog.

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