Power Toys to the rescue

By Andy Walker

Question: My nephew borrowed a game CD and installed it. It's designed for Windows 95 (I think it's SimCity but that's not important).
To make a long story short, after he was finished with it, he returned the CD and deleted the directory using Explorer, but in the Control Panel, Add/Remove Program, Install/Uninstall tab, there is still an entry for it. If you click on it to uninstall you get an error. I assume this entry on the Install/Uninstall tab is from the Registry! How do I go about removing it? Do I have to edit my registry? -- G.S.

Answer: Editing the Windows 95 or NT registry is the hard painful way to do it. Sort of like do-it-yourself dentistry. There is a simpler, less masochistic method you can use.

Several months ago, I mentioned Power Toys, a nifty freebie provided by Microsoft. It comes in handy in this situation. Download it from www.microsoft.com and install the Tweak UI program.

When the program's installed, double-click on the icon created in your Control Panel. Open it up and click on the Add/Remove tab. Pick the offending application and click Remove. It's almost as much fun as laughing gas and it never makes you swell up like a chipmunk.