Add-Remove Programs is REALLY messed up

Attached is a screen shot which shows the Add/Remove list on an HP laptop with XP Home SP2. I would say that 65% of the programs listed do not have any information (like the items identified in red in the screenshot). The rest of the items in the list are normal (identified with green). I have run two 3rd party uninstallers and the 'red' items don't show up in these uninstallers at all. Most don't show up under Start > All Programs, but a few do. Most also do not show up in C:\Program Files, but, again, some do. How do I fix this? I suppose I could manually search the uninstall keys and values in the registry, then remove each one as I find it, but we're talking hours of monotonous work. There must be an easy way to simply clean up Add/Remove Programs. Any help or suggestions will be appreciated.

THANKS!

 

Did you look at the screen shot? Well over half of the programs listed have no information, no Change/Remove button, and are not listed in C:\Program Files or in Start > All Programs. If you look at the screen shot you'll see the highlighted item as an example: it has no info and no Remove button. There are far too many messed up entries to 'not be concerned about'. Anyway, I have been using CCleaner since yesterday evening and at least the bogus listings show up in CCleaner; they didn't show up in other uninstallers. So far, CCleaner seems to be removing these bogus and/or damaged entries.

EDIT- the more I look at this, the more it seems that some of these are actual legitimate entries (like Adobe Reader for example) and that something has corrupted the Add/Remove applet. The only programs that are displayed properly are programs that have been installed fairly recently, or updated fairly recently. Knowing that Dial-A-Fix has a Control Panel applet repair option, I ran that and it made no difference. Is there any way to restore the info and the Change/Remove buttons to all the items in Add/Remove Programs that don't have 'em? I'd think that a simple (or not-so-simple) reg hack could do the trick.

 

Here's what I've tried: Dial-A-Fix, sfc /scannow, chkdsk /r from recovery console, repair install of XP Home SP2. So far nothing is helping. I really thought the repair install would help. A search of the knowledge base turned up nothing, then again, I couldn't decide what search terms to use....
If anyone has any ideas, please post 'em!
THANKS!

 

I gave up :cry I backed up 17gb of music to an external, formatted, and reloaded Windows. I hate admitting defeat.

 

A similar thing happened to me. I downloaded something infected via bittorrent, and now I can't run add/remove at all. I will begin the scrub-down tomorrow morning... ugh.