Remote Uninstall with Windows Installer Disabled

[parkerbyron]

I use group policy on my domain to disable windows installer on the user's computers. Currently I am unable to successfully remove any software with the 'remote uninstall' action (the path works and it tries to run). The error I am getting is 'uninstall failed'.

Does the fact (and this may be obvious to some of you) that I have windows installer disabled on all client machines via group policy prevent me from using the remote uninstall action?

Thanks!
Parker

[parkerbyron]

@rkotvis - thanks for the simple little trick that I would never have thought of!

[rkotvis]

It's possible to reconfigure the Windows Installer service from a batch file, start the service and execute Remoteuninst.exe. (It will take some time before Group Policy will disable the service again, so you'll probably want the batch file to take care of that as well.) Starting the service may take a few seconds, so you'll need a way to pause the batch file between the commands. If you're using Vista, you can use timeout.exe for this purpose. Otherwise, a tool like sleep.exe from the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&Displa...) will do the trick.

Reconfigure the custom action to point to the batch file (cmd.exe /K \\SERVER_NAME\SHARE_NAME\FILE_NAME.CMD {computer}) instead of Remoteuninst.exe. This will work if you're using a Vista pc to trigger your custom action:

@ECHO OFF
sc \\%1 config MSIServer start= demand
timeout.exe /T 5
sc \\%1 start MSIServer
timeout /T 5

\\SERVER_NAME\SHARE_NAME\Remoteuninst.exe %1

ECHO.
PAUSE

sc \\%1 stop MSIServer
timeout /T 5
sc \\%1 config MSIServer start= disabled

Replace the capitalized words with the correct values for your environment.

[parkerbyron]

Does this also apply to non-msi packages? I have tried uninstalling, let's say, PowerDVD from a client machine and it appears to get going and just counts the seconds for ever and ever and doesn't appear to actually do any uninstall. Could that be a result of there not being a 'silent' uninstall for the software?

[Hemoco]

parkerbyron wrote:
Does this also apply to non-msi packages? I have tried uninstalling, let's say, PowerDVD from a client machine and it appears to get going and just counts the seconds for ever and ever and doesn't appear to actually do any uninstall. Could that be a result of there not being a 'silent' uninstall for the software?

Yes, the non-msi packages "might" have silent parameters or not, it depends on the software vendor.

[Hemoco]

parkerbyron wrote:

Does the fact (and this may be obvious to some of you) that I have windows installer disabled on all client machines via group policy prevent me from using the remote uninstall action?

Yes, if windows installer is disabled you can't install or uninstall the msi packages.