Hi,
I know this is an old issue but had this problem today on an old XP laptop and whilst looking for the solution I found the web based information to be lacking.
I found the fix myself in the end so thought I would share!
My scenario was that whilst cleaning up a customer laptop I lost the option to uninstall any software from within the add/remove programs applet.
I cecked the registry where this information was held (hkey-local-machine/software/microsoft/windows/currentversion/uninstall) and could see this was pretty much empty. The few items that were there had the change/remove button available.
Clearly some registry corruption that would be corrected by a system restore but I didn’t want to do that just yet!
I know the registry is backed up pretty regularly so I checked c:\windows\repair and sure enough there are recent backups of the registry sections. I found a SOFTWARE file that was only a few days old – this is the section of the registry I’m interested in right now.
I opened regedit, selected hkey-local-machine then went to File – Load Hive – then pointed to c:\windows\repair\software.
This prompted for a name, this can be anything, I used SWTEMP. Once this was entered the registry backup was available in regedit.
I located the uninstall folder within this and sure enough this was fully populated. I right clicked on the uninstall folder and did an export to a file on the desktop. I then selected the SWTEMP folder then went to File – Unload Hive to remove this from regedit.
Next thing was to edit registry export file and correct the registry path changing it from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SWTEMP\ to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ – I used the search and replace notepad feature to speed this along.
The final thing to do was to save the changed registry file then import it.
Hey presto – I now have the buttons back across all applications.
Hopefully most people are moving on from XP now but I hope this helps anyone who encounters this problem in the future.
Cheers
Alastair
