Background
I wanted to remove all evidence of Roxio software on my Inspiron 9400 Vista Ultimate system. The Dell system was supplied with the Roxio software already “kindly” installed by Dell
Reasons for removal:
- I have had a number of disk corruption problems. Roxio software is a strong suspect – I’ll publish reasons for this in a separate blog entry.
- I have never needed to use the software and, as a matter of principle, I’d prefer to remove unnecessary, possibly buggy software.
- Two programs, and two system services are loaded and always running on my system:
- Services : – Rox Hard Drive Watcher 9 and RoxMediaDB9
- Programs: – ROXHelpRunner module and RoxMMTrayApp Module
- I had read in other internet/blog entries that these Rox modules can alter file attributes
Un-installation log
I searched the web for any guidance on this and found a document on the Roxio site at
http://kb.roxio.com/content/kb/Creator/000127CR. Whilst this is intended to help users re-install their software it gives explicit instructions on how to completely uninstall their software.
Comments below show how I followed each step on my system
Step 1. “Remove any Roxio and Sonic programs from Add or Remove Programs.”
This seemed to go fine for the quite lengthy list of Roxio software:
I did not need to use the Windows Installer Clean Up.
Step 2: Using MSCONFIG, there were no Sonic/Roxio solutions to remove.
Step 3 involves deleting these folders from the hard drive.
These included:
C:\Program Files\Roxio (not found)
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Roxio Shared (deleted)
C:\Users\Username\App Data\Local\Roxio (not found)
C:\Users\Username\App Data\Roaming\Roxio (deleted)
Step 4 involves removal of registry records. Use Regedit or an alternative registry editor.
Double-click the HKEY_CURRENT_USER folder this will expand or open the folder.
Locate the Software folder.
Locate the Roxio folder. (Not Found)
Right click on Roxio and click delete.
Do the same for the Sonic folder (if present). (Found and deleted)
Close the HKEY_CURRENT_USER folder.
Do the same for the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE folder.
Double-click the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE folder this will expand or open the folder.
Locate the Software folder
Locate the Roxio folder
Right click on Roxio and click delete. (Found and deleted)
Do the same for the Sonic folder (if present). (Found and deleted)
Close the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE folder.
After this, I tried to shut the system down. Shutdown had taken around 25 minutes. I was impatient and forced a shutdown after the disk light was no longer showing disk activity.
On restart, there was initially no sign of any problem resulting from the forced shutdown.
However I later found that whenever I closed down or restarted the system this resulted in a hang of about 20 minutes when there is no disk activity followed by a BSOD “Driver_Power_state_Failure”. See my later blog post for more detail.
Definitely a great idea! Had the same problem, thanks to your guide it’s now solved.
hi !
is there any utility that force uninstall ? i need a remover that do all operations automatically?
From teknobabble….
I’m sorry I don’t know of any utility – but just using Control Panel then Add/remove programs worked ok and quite quickly for me.
thx so much, I don;t understand why they would make such horrible program!
thank you :]
I have a question: In the registry of the Dell Inspiron 9400 (Vista) I had two listings for Sonic: One was simply called Sonic which I deleted according to your instructions, the other is called “Sonic Solutions”. That has two “subfiles”, one called explorer.exe and the other wmplayer.exe
Do I have to delete this “Sonic Solutions” as well as the “Sonic” ?
I am hoping that this deletion of Roxio will improve start-up time, normally around 20 minutes !!! A disgusting state of affairs compared to my Toshiba with XP which takes about 2 minutes to be fully up and running when I switch it on.
Dane,
I had mutiple problems with Vista on the Dell 9400.
In the end I did a complete re-install of Vista using a fresh OEM copy.
That cost money, but the resulting system now seems much more stable.
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thats it, bro
Hi,
Good article – I have a question though,
When you say:
“Step 4 involves removal of registry records
Double-click the HKEY_CURRENT_USER folder this will expand or open the folder.”
Where exactly is this folder located?
Thanks for your time,
Paul
Hi Paul,
For step 4, you need to edit the registry.
Be careful – if screw up up the registry you’re in serious trouble – it may be best to do a system backup first.
Most people use regedit to edit the registry. Go to start button and type regedit.
Good luck!
I have had exactly the same problems. Can’t tell you how much I hate Roxio after this. And I can’t believe that DELL has chosen this crapy software. I’d rather have a virus than installing Roxio again. I have a DELL XPS M1730 and absolutely love it. The Roxio experience has been my only disappointment and huge frustration. I managed back then to get rid of the runtimes and delete the files from the disk. But I am still stuck with the cluster of Roxio applications in my add/remove programs list. Haven’t had the energy yet to try and remove them. Cheers all !