With the official release of Internet Explorer 7 (and perhaps Firefox 2), you may find yourself wanting to uninstall the IE7 beta, but you get a message that tells you to log in as the same user who installed the product originally in order to uninstall. If you’re like me and have a tendency to muck about with users, that might be a lot easier said than done. Luckily, there is an answer.
You can simply recreate the registry key that the beta checks to see if you are indeed the user who installed the product, and if it’s there, it continues along its merry way, none the wiser. How’s that for intelligence? About par for the course, I’d say.
The problem, naturally, is knowing which key it is that you need to create. And of course having to get into the registry to do it. It’s not that the registry is hard, it’s just a pain to have to do it. To make things a bit easier, you can just save this tidbit as a file with an REG extension and when you double-click it, it will be imported for you, so you don’t have to do much yourself:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer]
@=""
"InstalledByUser"=dword:00000000
I can say that this works well on Windows XP SP2, but I can’t say for certain where else it will work. You may want to make sure that you have things backed up, just in case this causes you any problems. (via)