I was putting off an ERP Client update for so many days, up until we found a chance to Hit the upgrade button.
That meant that not only the ERP client was upgraded but also the new blue shiny .net 4 was also downloaded and installed. Thats when it all started.
Most of the Lenovo machines in the net that had windows XP Pro SP3 went completely dead. No network, no responsiveness, sloooooow login on to the domain, up until we had a pile of those machine stuck in a corner for inspection and eventual a reformat with windows 7 (A very long awaited and wanted opportunity :)).
That is all well until we stumbled across a system that it can simply not migrate to 7 due to incompatible and still usable software used on that machine.So we thought we should stop a second try to find out what went wrong in the first place. We knew that this could mean takeing longer to troubleshoot on system that reformating another ten, but on this case we had no options.
I sat down and did the forensics. What was the last thing all those systems did. The answer was simple! Upgrade to new blue shiny .net Framework 4. So I said lets get rid of it.
Nope! The login in the domain took minutes, hours, days, years! So let’s do it in safe mode. Nope sir! You can not install or uninstall something in safe mode. No Installer Service running. So here how you do it.
In order to uninstall a program in Windows, the Windows Installer Service has to be running. If you try to uninstall software in Safe Mode, Windows will just inform you that: “The Windows Installer Service could not be started.” Trying to start the service manually will only get you: “Error 1084: This service cannot be started in Safe Mode.”
The good thing is that it is not really difficult to outsmart Windows Safe Mode. All of the services that are allowed to start in Safe Mode are stored in the registry folder HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SafeBoot\Minimal\
All you have to do is to add a REG_SZ key with the service name (not the display dame) and the value data “Service” (without quotes). The service name of the Windows Installer Service is MSIService. As such, the REG file that adds the correct key looks like this:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SafeBoot\Minimal\MSIServer]
@=”Service”
All you have to do is copy this to a text file, with the extension .reg, and drop the file into your tool box. Anytime you want to uninstall a program in Safe Mode, you just click on the REG file. You have to remove the key manually if you want to disable this feature. However, I think it usually won’t do any harm.
Please note that it is not always possible to uninstall software in Safe Mode because the corresponding installer program requires certain services to be running. In such a case you might just enable these services as well in Safe Mode by adding their service names to the Registry. The Service Name can be found in the service’s properties in the Services snap-in.
After this process and a quick reboot I was finally able to get rid of this new devil.
I have not figured out yet why my default lenovo install and lenovo thinkcenters are not happy with .NET 4, but it whure give me some time to thing how to go around the upgrade process to windows 7
