Development | Starting Out

VBRegFix - The free answer to your eVB uninstall woes
Written by Ralph Brown  [author's bio]  [read 51147 times]
Edited by Derek

      

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Alternative solutions?

One objection to VBRegFix has been that, rather than using this somewhat Byzantine scheme of gelded files, secret copies and DLL inventories, why not just fix the problems in the VB Install Wizard? Not to put too fine a point on it, but that approach is unfortunately doomed to utter abject failure. If even one eVB program created using the normal eVB Application Install Wizard is uninstalled, it will clobber the shared DLLs used by the correctly installed programs, and they will all stop working. There are so many eVB programs already out there with faulty install files that it's pretty hopeless at this point. It's also not at all obvious to me how Microsoft is going to unwind this mess in the next version of WinCE without some serious code hacking. All those eVB programs aren't going away anytime soon, and more are being created and released into the mostly unsuspecting world every day.

The development community at work...

My last comment on VBRegFix is about the process of the development of the current version (2.2). I had released an earlier, less capable version, and, inspired by user feedback, posted my ideas for the new version on the Usenet WinCE newsgroups. There ensued a very useful and cordial conversation over the next week or so that helped immensely in the development. In parallel, some very brave souls were actually running the first versions on their machines and reporting non-optimal behavior patterns (ahem, bugs), and they were really good sports about it too. So I'd like to thank John Cody and Steve Maillet for their technical help in getting VBRegFix put together, and Roger Lo, Julio Meneses, and Kelly Nehowig for their help and great patience in finding bugs and vulnerabilities. This really was a community effort that would have been pretty much impossible without the Net and its netizens' goodwill and cooperation.

If you would like a copy of VBRegFix, it's free at www.nca-corp.com. Just be sure to read the Readme.htm file for how to use it and particularly how to uninstall it. The automatic running feature must be manually turned off if you remove VBRegFix; otherwise you'll get obscure error messages.

[deVBuzz note]

I'm very impressed by Ralph's endeavors with this problem and thought I would add a quick step-by-step of how to replicate the uninstall problem.

1) install at least TWO eVB applications on your Pocket PC

2) uninstall one of the applications using ActiveSync's - Tools -> Add/Remove Programs

3) attempt to run one of the other eVB apps, you will see an error message like this:

4) install and run VBRegFix

5) disconnect from ActiveSync

6) Sync to your desktop and install an eVB using ActiveSync

7) Disconnect and re-sync (to trigger the execution of VBRegFix)

8) Uninstall one of the eVB apps

9) Voilà! The other eVB applications still execute correctly.

The only problem I seemed to run into was that VBRegFix did not seem to run when I disconnected and reconnected - so I ran it from the Start menu and it worked like a charm.

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