Hi there,
Just updated to the latest 3.1.1.0, but the first version, 3.0.0.0 is still listed as being installed, can I safely uninstall it via add/remove programs, or will that screw up my newer version as well? (I upgraded via the internal check for updates/download/instal process)
Thanks!
You should be able to remove it using Windows uninstall tools.
If that causes issues with 3.1.1, you can reinstall from our website without affecting your existing projects. They are stored on your hard drive and not within the software.
That doesn’t mean it’s installed twice. It almost certainly isn’t. But the Registry is a moronic beast. To get rid of the listing in Settings, you need to edit the Registry or get a 3rd party app to do a complete uninstall (which isn’t fun, either). Then you’d reinstall the new version.
This is a known flaw with the Scrivener for Windows 3.x installer, there is an open bug for it, and we don’t know when it will bubble up to the top of the list to fix it.
When you have multiple listing of the same program in your installed programs list, and those entries represent upgrades to the same program, it has been my experience in the past that is because of a faulty installer/uninstaller routine that is not properly cleaning old entries out of the Registry during the upgrade. Note that this has nothing to do with the Registry but rather the installer toolkit and scripts used by the application.
I played with this several times during the Scrivener for Windows 3.x beta, and every time, this is what I found:
The entry you pick to uninstall is uninstalled and removed from Programs and Features, while the others remain. However, the underlying application that they all point to has been uninstalled, so the remaining entries are corrupt. If you try to uninstall them, Windows will tell you the program no longer exists and offer to remove it from the list.
Other users reported at times that they had some of these ghost entries that wouldn’t uninstall. Those took more work to deal with.
In the end, it is a purely cosmetic issue – since all of the registry entries for Scrivener are pointing to the same install. As long as Scrivener is working fine, you should be okay. If you are going to try to fix it, though, take a backup of all your Scrivener settings and make sure your Scrivener projects aren’t in the Scrivener installation folder (they shouldn’t be by default).
Thanks, all, so I think I’m going to leave well enough alone then, as I don’t want to mess with my settings in order to just clean up my programs list. As long as 300-something extra mb aren’t being used up, I’m OK with that! Cheers
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It’s an entry in the Registry, which I’d say does have a bit to do with it.
Those that point anywhere. The ghosts point nowhere, which doesn’t matter except, as you say, for cosmetic reasons. I think it’s very annoying when Settings shows me old versions that aren’t there.
But it’s not a problem because of the nature of the Registry; it’s a problem because the various entries in the Registry aren’t properly taken care during upgrades, so you have remnant entries. It’s exactly the same kind of problem one gets if people start directly messing with the component files within a Scrivener project, so that the various cross-references no longer point to each other properly.
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It would be nice if the Registry had a useful search feature and some kind of limit on what it includes, so that I could find all entries having to do with Scrivener without the result including potentially hundreds of irrelevant matches. That’s what gives 3rd party Registry editors a niche.
On the Mac, I’d go to Application Support▸Scrivener and find everything. Or I can use Finder to find everything (but also find a bunch of things inside the app’s package file).
If I uninstall, the Application Support folder won’t go away, but
- that’s a feature allowing me to reinstall without starting from scratch
- I can go there and delete it, if I want
- if I leave it there, it won’t rear its ugly head anywhere else