Uninstalling Google Desktop Search as another user is not possible.

April 7, 2005 8:53 PM | | Comments (3)

Apparently you can't uninstall the desktop search if you installed it as another user as you get the error message "Google Desktop Search was installed on this machine by a different user, DOMAIN\Username. To uninstall Google Desktop Search logon as that user" This is not necessarily possible if the domain doesn't exist anymore (and therefore you CANT log on as that user)
The funny thing is that if you enter the error message into Google it asks if you meant login and not logon. (and there are no results for either of the two options.
I've logged an error report with Google, so we'll see how long it takes for some action on this.

Categories:

3 Comments

By Jerry on April 12, 2005 8:36 PM

Tried this...?

How to manually uninstall Google Desktop Search
You can easily uninstall Google Desktop Search by going to Start > Programs > Google Desktop Search > Uninstall Google Desktop Search. If that didn't work, you may need to manually uninstall the program. Here is how:
TO EDIT THE WINDOWS SYSTEM REGISTRY:
As you may know, editing the Windows registry is a fairly advanced process. If you're not comfortable doing it yourself, you may want to contact your system administrator. That said, you should be able to solve the problem by deleting the following registry keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Google\Desktop
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Google\Google Desktop

You'll need to restart your machine in order for this change to take
effect. Once you've done this, you can remove the program files for
Desktop Search. Here's how:

TO REMOVE GOOGLE DESKTOP SEARCH:
Open C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME-THAT-NO-LONGER-EXISTS\Local
Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Desktop Search. Delete all the
files in this directory.

You should now be able to successfully install and use Google Desktop
Search

----

I just did this on one of my Exec's laptops and it worked fine.

By Matthew Feinberg on April 20, 2005 12:13 AM

I did not need to reboot using the following method

I downloaded psgetsid from
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/psgetsid.shtml

I then ran
psgetsid.exe [loggedin user name]

The output provided says
SID for [full user name]
S-....

Using regedit I copied the first part into
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Google\Google Desktop\InstalledNtUserName

and I copied the second part into
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Google\Google Desktop\InstalledNtUserSid

I was then able to go to
Start > Programs > Google Desktop Search > Uninstall Google Desktop Search

Which successfully removed the software.

By Brian on April 28, 2005 4:29 AM

Jerry's solution worked fine for me. Many thanks

Categories

Monthly Archives

Pages

Powered by Movable Type 4.1

Search

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by published on April 7, 2005 8:53 PM.

How to get the perfect shave. was the previous entry in this blog.

Manually removing Google Desktop is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.