Beach Life unable to remove
 

Can anyone help with an irritating problem.
I have installed beach life onto windows xp and for obvious reasons tried to install a no cd crack which didn't work.
Now when I try to remove beach life it goes through the motions but never fully removes it. I have removed the software file in reg edit but I believe there is another file i need to remove.
Can anyone help as it is getting rather annoying and I do not want to make my PC fly !!!:confused:

What exactly is the problem ? Is it the fact that you still see that game in the Add/Remove programs list ? Or do you want to reinstall it but the setup program claims it's still installed and doesn't let you reinstall ? Or do you get an error message each time you boot that it can't find one of the Beach Life dlls ? I can think of another few scenarios, but it would be easier if you told us what exactly is going wrong and what irritates you so much.

I want to reinstall the game but when I autorun XP throws an error.
When i run the setup after exploring the cd it gives the option to install but all it does is go through the uninstall process.

The game is listed in add/remove and it again goes through the remove process.

I have searched the registry files and removed all the files I can find connected to the game and also browsed the hard drive.

The frustration is that after deleting every file I can, all I get is the uninstall process.
After deleting the registry files ican get autorun from the cd to give an install option but again it goes throught the uninstall, I beleive its an XP issue with trying to run a nocd crack, I may just remove it and go back to 98SE as it least its stable.

I don't think so. The only difference is that w98 would give you either a blue screen and then crash, or just crash. The fact that you're getting an error screen and that you can continue using your pc without rebooting is one of the big ADVANTAGES of XP. As for the error you're getting, it's a known problem with some badly designed installation programs. I don't really know what more you can do, except maybe try to look for any "uninstall" keys in the registry, look for one that points to the game. If you delete this key (make sure that it's the beach life one), the install program should be force to install instead of trying to remove the installation.

Thanks for your help, I had a good look around last night and resolved the problem. FYI XP creates a hidden file in the administrator folder called installshield when a violition is detected, (in this case I had used a no cd crack). This 'shield' then stops any installations of the game from then on hence the reason the system thinks the game is already on and so I get the uninstall each time. Once this installshield folder was removed I was okay to carry on as normal.
Thanks for your interest though
Scungy

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In the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is king --- long live the king

Hey thanks, now that's useful info, even for me. Could you please give a full path to where that file was on your system ? I can't seem to find it here (and I've had similar problems in the past). If this really works then a big InstallShield mystery has been solved. Good work !

First of all you have to be logged on as an administrator. Then you have to make sure the at you are also viewing hidden files.
(i'm at work and my XP machine is at home) i will get the full path and update this thread with all the info I can,
I have looked around for this problem and as I understand installshield is the program the game uses to install itself, XP creates this folder when it sees a conflict in the installation.
I'll post a full instruction at a later date and hopefully it may be of use to others.
Cheers
Scungy