Add/Remove Programs Broken Options

[peekj]

First off, I haven't scanned for spyware yet, but Spybot Search & Destroy as well as my virus scanner runner nightly, so something would have been caught.

Here's what's happening. In my Add/Remove Programs menu, if I try to click the Remove or Change/Remove button windows tells me that this program has already been removed and asks if i want to remove it from the list.
Now I know this happens if you manually delete the program or something like that.
But this happens to virtually all of the programs in the list! At least 9/10 of them.

I can still remove programs properly but I have to use a third-party uninstaller.

Just wondering if anyone's ever heard of this.

This is going on on Windows XP SP2 and has never happened before. No changes took place around the time this first occurred (2 days ago).

[Singh400]

hmmmmmm 1st check the corresponding keys in the registry to the programs shown in Add/Remove Menu. go here to check :

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

or you just mite have a corrput installer

[KelpFries]

There is your answer right there, SP2!!! Happened to me. A little tip for you, SP2 for some reason causes a rogue svchost.exe process to run. Whatever this process is doing screws up multiple things on a system. CD's don't run correctly, some control panel items don't run correctly, MSI installers hang, some properties such as My Computer properties don't work. Stopping this rogue svchost.exe process brings the system back to life. Only problem is, there are multiple svchost.exe processes running and its hard to tell which one is causing the issue. It's not a fix and I have contacted Microsoft about the issue but have yet to receive a fix for it. I ended up slipping SP2 and installing XP clean, had no problems after that.

[peekj]

Really, eh? I was sure I had SP2 installed before and it still worked fine. But I will check the registry, run a windows scan on system files and otherwise wait for MS to patch their patches

[peekj]

FYI: Looks like it was Prevx Home's fault. Don't know why but I think their latest beta version causes that problem. Doesn't matter to me though, I can still use my other uninstall software without problems.

[Singh400]

ah well im glad ur got the problem fixed

if u can read this, then i suggest that u stop highlighting everything