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View Full Version : Warning on uninstall hack


thorfrog
September 30th, 2002, 04:45 PM
Last night I uninstalled Total War-MiddleAges, and a deleted some minor files. When I went over to play SEIV all of my games were either uninstalled or partially deleted. Last night I spent my time reinstalling my games. But I lost alot. Now only my games folder was effected by this. No other damage occured to my system. Has anyone ever heard of such a thing? I suspect a few things: the uninstall for Total War-MA has a bug that will uninstall all programs in the same folder, I was hacked, virus (I doubt it), or user error (doubt also). Let me know if anyone else has experience this.

Mylon
September 30th, 2002, 09:20 PM
A handful of programs have made it to shelves that have very harmful bugs in the uninstall program. Most of the bugs seem to follow a pattern:

1) They only occour when the program is installed in the non-default directory (IE, a directory other than c:\program files\publisher\game\)
2) They tend to delete everything on a drive.

These aren't absolute, but some programs are known to have these problems. If I recall collectly, Myth II and Pools of Radiance both suffered from these bugs. There are a couple of other games, but I don't recall what they are. This is exactly why I _never_ make use of the uninstall feature of Windows.