Thursday, May 10, 2012

Cannot uninstall - msi is on a network resource that is not available

Symptom: You try to remove a program from your machine but the operation fails and you see a message along the lines of “the so and so msi is on a network resource that is not available”. Even if you try to locate the original msi and tell windows where it is it may still fail. This often happens when you are trying to install a new version of a software and the new version attempts to remove the old one but fails.

Cause:  the installation of that software has become corrupt. You may have manually deleted the files from your machine instead of properly uninstalling the application or something else happened on the machine but one way or another Windows cannot find the files it needs where it expects to find them in order to successfully remove the application.

Resolution:  Microsoft has provided a fix for this problem here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2438651/ - this utility will clean up the registry entries belonging to that application so that you can install the new version of the application in question if you need to.

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