I'm experiencing something rather strange:
I had to reinstall Tomcat 6 on my local Windows 7 machine. In sys control, there was no entry to uninstall, so I seem to have installed it by ZIP only. I just deleted all files.
I then downloaded the installer for Tomcat 6 and installed into the same directory as before, WITH service. The installer finished copying the files, then threw an error dialog at me that the service couldn't be started.
Damn, I forgot to kill the service before deleting the old install! So I deleted the service manually (Ctrl-Alt-Del -> Services... -> ...).
After reconfiguring and reinstalling via installer approx. 5 more times, I experienced some strange things:
1: When starting up Windows, a dialog pops up saying
Application System Error,
Access denied,
Unable to open the service 'Tomcat6'
... this is never a good sign.
2: Deployment behavior of my webapp had absolutely ridiculous behavior. Sometimes the app wasn't updated at all, when I found out about the presence of some invisible "shadow" service that also still seemed to exist.
Fortunately I have two local host configs in my server.xml, so bbstats.localhost:8080 and tomcat.localhost:8080/bbstats/home got me to the same app ever since. I then realized that using bbstats.localhost:8080 brought me either to the new webapp version, whereas tomcat.localhost:8080/bbstats/home got me to the new one or vice versa.
Ant DeployTask and UndeployTask sometimes showed weird errors and seem to get confused. Absolutely strange how something like that can still happen in 2010!
Now, this is essentially a Windows 7 cleanup question:
How do I get rid of all traces of the shadowing Tomcat 6 service? I would be happy to remove all Tomcat 6 references and start all over with a clean install. But how can I really make sure? Registry? I don't really trust that from the experiences of the past, but if there's no other way I'll try it. Some free cleaning softwares?
Sat all night to find out - Windows as development machine... yuckity yuck.
Karsten