Been quite busy with the project almost over and swamped with the exit process! Life seems hell…

During the course, I screwed up my laptop and had to have IT reimage it, one of the worst things that happened was, the image they loaded on my lappy had Windows Desktop Search installed – Oh man, it was taking up memory/CPU and slogging my machine. So thought it’d be easy to uninstall it, but hell no – it just wouldn’t go.

So decided to Google on it, but guess what – there are different threads speaking about the same thing and they differ based on the version installed. Mine in question was Windows Desktop Search 4.0

Ideally, it should show up in Add/Remove programs and should be just one click to get it uninstalled but then it would be too easy, wouldn’t it be LOL.

So finally uninstalled it by looking into a lot of other blogs and stuff, so here is what worked.

You need the uninstaller like any other program but which gets installed like a service pack/KB format – pretty much you’re done if you don’t have those folders under the %systemroot% and I didn’t have it.

%systemroot%\$NtUninstallKB917013$\spuninst\spuninst.exe

The above is what we’re looking at which is not present in my machine; Worse still, even if you install it again, it doesn’t create this uninstall path.

So opened the registry using regedit and deleted 2 of the keys.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Updates\Windows XP\SP3\

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\

and delete the key folder KB940157 from there.

Then install Windows Desktop Search 4.0 again from downloading it from Microsoft site. Voila, the uninstall folder is created…

Then just run this “C:\WINDOWS\$NtUninstallKB940157$\spuninst”

It’ll uninstall it completely and you are back with your laptop without performance hog.

As much as I like Microsoft products, these folks tend to bring some of these annoyances once it a while – Well, I’m perfectly fine with it considering the useful stuff they make.

It sure did take some of my time.