Uninstalling Windows OneCare in Vista RC2

I upgraded my home PC to Vista today from XP Mediacenter edition and earlier this week I had an email that the new OneCare 1.5 beta was released and “NOW WORKS WITH VISTA”. So I figured I’d install the new version of OneCare.

First, you have to uninstall OneCare before installing a new version, the problem is trying to uninstall OneCare I kept getting an error ‘0x2’. DOH!

So here’s the trick to uninstalling OneCare (courtesy of this link).

  1. Download the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility: msicuu2.exe
  2. Run this program. If it doesn’t run/install right click on it and select “Run as Administrator”. That solved this step for me.
  3. After installed, run this utility by going to: Start -> All Programs -> Windows Installer Cleanup. 
  4. ‘Cleanup’ all of these apps. If you don’t see them all don’t work, I only had 3 or 4 of them:

    Dr Watson for Microsoft Windows OneCare Live
    Microsoft Windows OneCare Live
    Microsoft Protection Service
    PX Engine
    Microsoft Malware Protection Engine Files
    Microsoft Malware Protection On Access Scanner

  5. Try to uninstall onecare and if it fails then proceed to step 6.

  6. Download the Windows Live OneCare uninstall program: 48034

  7. Run the uninstall program you just downloaded, rightclicking and running it as admin if it fails. Now the first time I ran this my box bluescreened (yeah they still exist go figure!) but when it rebooted and I ran it again, it ran without a problem and uninstalled the app without a problem.

That’s it that’s how I managed to uninstall OneCare from within Vista RC2 (Build 5744)

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