Windows Installer "cleanup"

Here is a good tip for those of you running Windows XP (and maybe some other versions):

Sometimes, Windows Installer requires files such as patches that have been installed and removed by disk cleanup, or becomes corrupted. This causes you to have problems uninstaling or even doing repair installs on the program in question. In my case Office XP broke during a hard drive upgrade, and required the service pack installers to  uninstall or do a repair install, which were deleted at some point. Microsoft has a tool which removes the listing, essentially marking programs uninstalled so you can reinstall over top of them, getting you a clean install which you can remove or use as needed. I found this to be a little hard to find, so here is a l ink to the knowledge base article and download.

Note that while this utility doesn't actually remove the program files, it may very well cause programs to stop working if you haphazardly play with it. It isn't officially supported so you can't blame me (as always) or Microsoft if something goes wrong.