How do I do whatever it was that the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility did?

Question

Microsoft's "Windows Installer CleanUp Utility" could be used to help fix broken installations of MSI-installer based products. When the installer failed in some strange way and left corrupt data behind, so bad that even Add/Remove Programs couldn't help, you could often fix things by running this utility and then running the application's installer again.

I just discovered that Microsoft announced a couple weeks ago that they were discontinuing this utility. They didn't merely say "we're not supporting it anymore"; they seemingly removed it from their site entirely.

I have to support a Windows program for a whole bunch of users. Given the number of users, every so often something will go wrong, and this program has been invaluable for me, as a last-ditch line of defense.

I know I could point customers to some third party site that has a cached copy of it, but this seems dangerous (malware potential and such).

So, are there any replacement products? Or, if not, how can I myself do whatever it is that this program did?

To be clear, I'm not asking for help like "how do I programatically modify the registry". I can do that fine. But I need to know what in the registry needs to be modified.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Windows Installer CleanUp utility was never intended to be used in the wild. It was only meant to be used by software developers. If you occasionally have end users needing to use WCU you have some serious installer quality issues that should be addressed.

WCU only removes the Windows Instaleller meta data and doesn't actually uninstall any software. This leaves the machine in a very dirty state. These days with test labs becoming virtualized there's no reason to have this tool anymore. You just roll back to a prior snapshot and keep on working.

I've seen all kinds of online forums full of users who think they know what they are doing ( and don't ) suggest using WCU to solve various problems so in the end Microsoft decided to try to get the horse back in the barn.

I have old copies of WCU archived in my CM system so if you'd like me to generate checksums to help you determine if you are getting a good copy just let me know.

Answer 2

The cleanup utility was a wrapper around the command line utility msizap.exe, described here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa370523%28VS.85%29.aspx#1