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.
