I got a humdinger of a problem.

So I issued a new laptop to someone at work, and they succeeded in screwing up the most important thing we use on the computer. Microsoft SQL Server. Anyway, I have succeeded in removing all instances of the program, and I was able to install one program that installs it's own instance of SQL with no issues.

However, I have another program that uses it's own SQL instance and when I go through the workstation setup, it stalls and doesn't even begin to install SQL. I tried installing the program sans the SQL instance (we can do that with this program) but it stalled there, so I'm thinking that not SQL problem, but problem with the installer.

Now I have to mention that this latter program was installed previous during the day so I know it works with the OS and whatnot, but I was getting errors during installation prior to all of the above saying I didn't have sufficient permissions to a particular registry key. I went into the permissions for the parent key and while it allowed me to add my administration account name, it would still say something like "Permissions may not have been applied to all subkeys" etc.

So what I'm wondering is, would it maybe be a good idea that after a system file checker to run a repair install on Windows 7 to fix any wonky registry issues?

 

Just wondering if anyone on here has any experience with completely removing all references of SQL?