Changing the title of an "Add or Remove Programs" entry
Posted by davidnewcomb on 08 Sep 2009 in Techie
I was looking through my Control Panel, doing a bit of house keeping and saw an entry I didn’t recognise. The title was just “0.2″! I wanted to get the properties of it and find out what it was. Unfortunately there is no right-click properties, so how can I find out what the entry in the Add and Remove Programs actually points to? And once I have found it can I rename it to something more sensible? But where do I start?
Registry criteria for inclusion in Add or Remove Programs
An entry will appear in the Add or Remove Programs (part of the Control Panel) if the following requirements are satisfied:
- There is a key in the registry location:
.HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
- The key contains a String Value called DisplayName which is not empty.
- The key contains a String Value called UninstallString.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
key and search for “DisplayName"="<what ever is in the control panel list>".
As it turned out the entry titled “0.2″ was pointing to GenIconXP, which is a discontinued Open Source Project. Its installer had added the wrong name. I went into the registry (with regedit) and opened up HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\GenIconXP
and changed the DisplayName from “0.2″ to “GenIconXP 0.2″. Loaded Add or Remove Programs and it now displayed the GenIconXP’s title in a more user friendly manner.No feedback yet
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