Removing Windows Search 4.0 Without It Showing Up in the Add / Remove Programs Control Panel

With Microsoft’s recent release of Windows Search 4.0 for Windows XP, a number of users who had it installed complained about their system becoming rather slow and they wanted the old search functionality returned.  In most cases, a simple uninstall via Add/Remove Programs restored the search functionality to its previous incarnation, but in one particular stubborn case, “Windows Search 4.0” did not show up in Add/Remove programs while Windows Search 4.0 was clearly installed (toolbar and the taskbar icon were present, as were the individual processes).  Unfortunately, C:\Windows\$NtUninstallKB940157$ was not present, either, so a manual uninstall could not be performed.
The solution was to forcefully remove the following registry entries, via regedit:

  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Updates\Windows XP\SP3\KB940157
  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\KB940157

Once those were removed, manually installing Windows Search 4.0 from Microsoft got the add-on to install properly, complete with an entry in Add/Remove Programs.  Finally, selecting “Remove” from the Add/Remove Programs control panel for “Windows Search 4.0” did the deed and removed it from the system.

Fedora (with Gnome) and VMWare Workstation 6.5 = keyboard trouble

This didn’t happen for me with previous versions of Fedora or previous version of VMWare Workstation, but it seems to have happened to others at varying times.  This problem came about for me when I upgraded to Fedora 10 (I had already been using VMWare Workstation 6.5 with no issues).

I have Windows XP running in a VM to deal with the “windows-only” aspects of my daily job, and after the Fedora 10 upgrade, a handful of keys no longer worked properly.  These problem keys were:

  • insert
  • home
  • page up
  • delete
  • end
  • page down
  • all of the arrow keys (left, right, up, down) – It should be noted that the left arrow was acting like the “alt” key and the down arrow was acting like the “windows” key.

The solution, as found on this page, is easily summarized like this:

  1. Create (if it does not yet exist) ~/.vmware/config
  2. In that file, enter the following:
  3. xkeymap.keycode.108 = 0x138 # Alt_R
    xkeymap.keycode.106 = 0x135 # KP_Divide
    xkeymap.keycode.104 = 0x11c # KP_Enter
    xkeymap.keycode.111 = 0x148 # Up
    xkeymap.keycode.116 = 0x150 # Down
    xkeymap.keycode.113 = 0x14b # Left
    xkeymap.keycode.114 = 0x14d # Right
    xkeymap.keycode.105 = 0x11d # Control_R
    xkeymap.keycode.118 = 0x152 # Insert
    xkeymap.keycode.119 = 0x153 # Delete
    xkeymap.keycode.110 = 0x147 # Home
    xkeymap.keycode.115 = 0x14f # End
    xkeymap.keycode.112 = 0x149 # Prior
    xkeymap.keycode.117 = 0x151 # Next
    xkeymap.keycode.78 = 0x46 # Scroll_Lock
    xkeymap.keycode.127 = 0x100 # Pause
    xkeymap.keycode.133 = 0x15b # Meta_L
    xkeymap.keycode.134 = 0x15c # Meta_R
    xkeymap.keycode.135 = 0x15d # Menu

Save the file and start VMWare Workstation to get the full functionality of the keyboard back.