John Wood

Before you re-install that application...

You wouldn't think that uninstalling an application would render other, unrelated applications unusable. Especially uninstalling an application as well known as Norton AntiVirus - but it does just that. I uninstall the trial edition and the next thing I know Visual Studio's wizards have stopped working with an error such as "Could not run the … .vsz wizard" appearing when I try to add new items to projects. And of course I didn't notice this until the morning afterwards, when I actually needed to start working...

So I surfed for an answer. One suggestion I found on google didn't work. Still got the error. The only option left, I thought, was to re-install or repair Visual Studio, killing what could have been a productive morning.

But then I thought - I doubt it's removed any of the files, more than likely it's just unregistered something it shouldn't have. So I tried something... a simple dos command to register all the DLLs in the current folder down...

for /r . %p in (*.dll) do @regsvr32 /s "%p"

I ran that command from the dos prompt at the Visual Studio .Net folder, restarted Visual Studio and voilla it was fixed.

So maybe next time you think you need to re-install an application because the installation has broken, you could try this simple command from DOS and see if that fixes your problems, it might save you a heck of a lot of time.