When does "UNINSTALL" NOT mean "UNINSTALL?"

Catchy question, eh? Not really? You're probably right. After all, there are plenty of other catchy things in the news right now, such as the MSM's refusal (save the New York Times) to cover the growing Climate-Gate scandal. I'll write about it soon, I promise. But for now...

When does UNINSTALL NOT mean UNINSTALL?

Sometimes, when you select "UNINSTALL" the program(s) being uninstalled will leave parts of itself (themselves) behind:

* registry entries
* installation folder (Main folder)
* auxillary folders (Game or data folders)

Given the complexity of today's programs, this could easily be expected. Plus, today's hard drives are gargantuan in size given yesterday's models, so programmers might not feel too badly in leaving small bits behind. But let's select one for the dubious distinction of NOT being able to UNINSTALL itself.

Star Wars Galaxies.

Last month, I cancelled my subscription to Star Wars Galaxies. Why? There are several reasons for this, none of which are important to the subject at hand - that is, the program's being unable to UNINSTALL itself. Since they bill one month in advance, the unsubscribe actually took effect today. So, today; when I tried to sign in, I was correctly told that I did not have a valid subscription. This is all well and good, and operated exactly as expected.

I selected the compete uninstall option from the options in Add/Remove Programs. Now to you and I perhaps, "complete" means "complete." Just to be certain, however, I went to dictionary.com for a definition of "complete."

1. having all parts or elements; lacking nothing; whole; entire; full: a complete set of Mark Twain's writings. (This is exactly as it appears on their definition.) (*)

4. thorough; entire; total; undivided, uncompromised, or unmodified: a complete victory; a complete mess. (This is exactly as it appears on their definition.) (*)

The key points of this are, to me, "having all parts or elements; lacking nothing; whole; entire; full; thorough; total; and unmodified." To me, this means, the entire thing should have been uninstalled.

Alas, "complete" does not mean "complete" over at Sony Online Entertainment (SOE, the folks that publish Star Wars Galaxies.)

During the installation of the game, I had selected the installation drive as Drive D, the second physical hard disk on this computer. (I actually have a Western Digital USB drive that I sometimes use, but this is a detachable drive, so it was not used at the installation drive.)

The game installed itself into the Program Files folder on D. "D:\Program Files\StarWarsGalaxies) And, over the years of playing the game, it grew to a size of 6.35G, or, 6,821,743,799 bytes.

Today, I selected the "complete" uninstall option. Again, to you and I perhaps, this should have taken the "complete" folder with it.

But this is SOE that we're talking about.

SIZE BEFORE "complete" uninstall: 6,821,743,799
SIZE AFTER "complete" uninstall: 6,127,948,560.

::blink:: In dividing that out, we learn that the "complete" UNINSTALL left 89.8301% of itself behind.

Oops. Yes, it removed the entry in the Start Menu, but it somehow also missed the entry that had been pinned to the Start Menu.

But there's more.

Do you remember my telling you that I had specifically requested during installation that all files be installed onto drive D, the second physical hard drive? Again, to you and I perhaps, that means that everything should have been installed onto drive D.

But, again, this is SOE we're talking about.

Specifically, C:\Program Files\Sony\Station\LaunchPad.

Size BEFORE UNINSTALL: 15,625,583 bytes or 15.8G
Size AFTER UNINSTALL: same.

That's right, folks. Not only should it not have installed itself onto drive C, but it magically left every bit of itself behind.

To be honest here there are several different games that SOE publishes, all of which use LaunchPad to launch (start) the games. So in this regard perhaps, it's understandable that it should leave itself behind, and only remove the SWG portion of itself.

But, frankly, I would have expected itself to know that there were no other SOE games installed, and for it to have given me the opportunity to uninstall it. It did neither.

Nor does it show up under Add/Remove Programs. (Time for that full disclosure thing; if you manually install LaunchPad after installing SWG it will show up under Add/Remove Programs. However, during this install, I simply installed SWG only, which itself installed LaunchPad. And onto the wrong disk to boot.)

To make matters worse, it uninstalled not one single byte.

Oops.

(*) - http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/complete