Uninstalling the QuickTime Virus Program

Thinking I was going to achieve all kinds of cool things, I decided to install a mega-codecs pack to my PC. However, once I did, I discovered that it completely messed up my current installation of QuickTime, which in turn completely messed up my current installation of ITunes, causing ITunes to crash upon launching. After uninstalling and reinstalling ITunes several times, I realized that it was actually my installation of QuickTime that was corrupt and needed to be reinstalled.

After an attempt to remove QuickTime through Add/Remove Programs failed (after all, why should it be that easy?), I received a notification that QuickTime could not be installed due to the fact that it was already installed on the machine. I then decided to go plowing through the registry and remove all references to Quicktime. This was no small task, as Quicktime scatters over 600 keys throughout the registry. After scrubbing my registry to within an inch of its life, the Quicktime installer still insisted the program existed on the machine.

I searched the internet for clean uninstall directions and finally came across these instructions from Apple. Apparently Quicktime throws some kind of version tag in the C:\Windows\System32 folder that its uninstaller fails to remove. Once I deleted those files and rebooted my PC, I was finally able to reinstall Quicktime and get up and running in ITunes.

If I had a mind for conspiracy theories I would suppose that the uninstallation process is made intentionally difficult to cause someone to say to themselves “Wow, that was difficult – next time I won’t bother removing the software, I’ll just leave it on there.” The truth is probably more prosaic – few programmers and software publishers are responsible enough to ensure that their software will cleanly uninstall, and it is probably a forgotten step in the QA process.