I’ve been around Microsoft Windows for a long time. Long enough to remember (not that it’s been THAT long, really) the days when there was no uninstall routines in Windows. I don’t remember when it happened (Win98, perhaps), Windows put in a centralized uninstall area. That’s generally been a good idea, I think. However, what bugs me are stupid programs that don’t handle themselves properly.

Case in point is the Mozilla Firefox browser (although Lord knows it’s FAR from the only one with this issue). This kind of program has a decent amount of upgrades and new versions. Problem is that when you put a new one in there, the uninstall info isn’t properly updated, so you get multiple versions of the same program in your uninstall list. If you uninstall one of them, it removes the program from your machine, and leaves the others in the list. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy!

If you look at the screen dump from my Add/Remove programs list below, you’ll see what I’m talking about. I don’t really blame Windows for this, I blame the stupid programs that don’t properly update their uninstall information so there’s only one version of the uninstall information in the list, and with the proper version number, too.

However, if you have the program installed more than once, that’s a different story entirely, but most people don’t have multiple copies of the same program on their computer at the same time.