Add/Remove Programs strangeness

WinXP Home SP2 - the Add/Remove Programs window only has a "Remove" button on less than half of the items listed. There doesn't seem to be any sort of reasoning behind which items have a "Remove" button and which don't. For example: DiskKeeper Lite has no "Remove" button when it's highlighted, but iTunes does. Is there an easy way to get "Remove" buttons back on everything?

 

If you sort them by date, is there an obvious before/after split in them? (I'm thinking some kind of 'cleanup' app went wrong at some time).

 

Odd question dlb, but the account your using is it a Local Administrator?
Seems odd that some you can and some you can't. Also, what I'm thinking is maybe those programs was installed by another person, and cause and effect, can only be removed by that person. As far as I know. Local Administrator Account, and wipe it all out

 

@ satrow: it's interesting that you mention day/time. When I was working on this PC yesterday, I never powered it down completely and restarted. I did restart it a bunch of times but never powered it off. So today I powered it on and got a CMOS error - "time and date not set - press <F2> for Setup". So I unplugged the power cord, popped the CMOS battery and hit it with my digital multimeter... it read 0.32v!!!! So a new battery is going in right now. I think the PCs owner ran it with the wrong date and time, and every time he powered it on, it would revert back to May 2003, so all the dates and times of everything were wrong.... this is likely the cause of all the problems.....

@ Elder_Usr: I'm assuming it is the Local Admin account, I'll double check.

 

It's impossible to tell when the programs were really installed because of this time/date issue. I'm surprised (and embarassed) that I didn't notice it yesterday. I installed CCleaner yesterday and now the Add/Remove Programs shows that it was installed or used last on March 16 2003. :cry I'm fairly certain that a repair install will NOT fix the problem.

 

Hmm, maybe running the Windows Installer cleanup utility http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301 would allow you to uninstall or reinstall some of the Apps that were installed via .msi packages?

 

*Nods* I think your onto something there.