[treefrog]

I am asking longtime users of TU to give opinions/suggestions.

I have been doing "dummy installs" to hopefully find all file changes that may occur during an install. After 6 dummy installs, I finally got a clean record. But my thought is, as I install new software (which I do a lot of), I will always have more and more files I need to "ignore".

I think after every "real" install I will have to pick through each new record with an extremely sharp eye to make sure I don't delete a previous install's new files. This is especially true of registry items that are sometimes very cryptic.

Just when the above was daunting enough, then I made a dummy install that required a reboot. Over 60 files were changed! (edit: and almost 600 registry changes) I have not tested this theory, but I imagine that this too will constantly change as I add more "real" installs.

So here are my thoughts/ramblings/questions:
How does one deal with this? Maybe I am doing something wrong, is their a better way? Or is this just "the price to pay" for wanting clean uninstallations? Is all this worth it?
I`m also thinking something like REVO uninstaller at least gets "most" of the leftovers, couldn't one just do it that way, leave well enough alone, and have a much easier day?

Thanks for opinions/advice.

[treefrog]

Wait a minute. Let me rethink this outloud. In the "changes" window, on "view" button, "changed items" was checked. Of course that means I was only viewing changed files/registry. Now, did I read somewhere that files only changed are left alone during the uninstall process? Which means I would only have to exclude/ignore "created" files?

That would mean many less items to ignore! I hope this is correct. But it would make me wonder - why changed files would even be shown if they are not affected by uninstall? Seems this is either incorrect or confusing - either way is not good!

[Total Uninstall]

I know it has been a long time since the above was posted. Sorry, I didn't know the forum was back up (it was offline for a loooooong time). IT WOULD HAVE BEEN NICE TO KNOW!

When used to uninstall a monitored application, Total Uninstall does not touch files that were detected as having changed. It's still useful to detect those changes, since sometimes you might want to know everything an application does when it is installed and/or used. (As just one example, some programs modify boot.ini or win.ini.)

If you don't want to see changed files, you can configure the views so you don't have to look at them.