Is there a way to uninstall a program and actually get rid of the whole thing without leaving any traces of it. It seems that everytime I uninstall a program there are lots of remains. I know there are programs out there that claim to do this, but I was hoping someone had a method that didn't require yet another program. How do you uninstall the Uninstall programs? Thanks in advance.

There could be files practially anywhere on your machine, hiding under a multitude of names unconnected with the actually programs name. You could go through the registry and delete all references to the prog...BUT if you don't know what you're doing it could be a disaster and as I said who knows what name they've filed it under. Much better to buy a uninstaller. I've found McAfee Unistaller easy to use

Hmmm, a tricky one Unless you reverse engineer the installer, or take a before / after snapshot of your hard drive there is really no way of "knowing" what an installer does. Often programs use shared libraries or dlls, and make them available to the rest of the system, but the uninstaller will generally not delete these libraries, just in case something else you installed since needs them. Disclaimer: I am presuming that you are not attempting to trick a trial program to cheat you more days. etc. On that aside, programmers often do tricky things like altering the date of particular files, installing fake device drivers and alike. Programs like McAfee can monitor changes in the registry and effectively roll them back, but all the demo protection technologies are specifically developed to leave themselves a trail, even if one of these programs is run. The best thing to do is to avoid installing rubbish (I generally test programs on one PC before installing it on my main PC). If all you are concerned about is wasted space then chances are the programs uninstaller will delete 99% of the files. Generally if it leaves its folder in Program Files or something, it is because it could not delete a file (you might have a saved game etc in it)

Thanks, and no I am not trying to trick any program. I simply was looking for a more thorough way of uninstalling programs. Thanks again.