Uninstalling Windows ME

[piku]

I installed ME onto a Windows 98 installation a few months ago, and I want to uninstall it. Its been acting up latley and almost all of my games lock up on me and I just wanna go back to 98

ME allows you to uninstall it, but it says that you will need to reinstall all programs installed in ME, and a bunch of other stuff. What exactly happens? Will is completley screw up my system uninstalling it? Will I lose all the stuff I have on my hard drive? Any help appreciated.

 

[Noriaki]

Good choice...I didn't like WinME either I'm staying with 98SE.

Anyhow, it just means that it won't propogate new registry entries back to Win98.
When you uninstall it won't affect the programs on your hard drive, but your registry will look like it did before you installed WinME, so any new programs since then will not have their registry entries and thus won't run right.

Anything you had on before you installed WinME will be fine, and new data files you've downloaded will be fine, and any programs that don't happen to use the registry will be fine.

Edit: In that last paragraph replace "will" with "should", I make no guarantees But that is what it means.

 

[medic]

BACKUP everything important first, I had WinMe for about a week before I flushed it and the uninstall hosed W98..I had the ever popular vmm32.vxd errors, and they are nearly impossible to troubleshoot.

 

[piku]

Yeah that is the sort of problem I am having CRV. Something that I am finding impossible to troubleshoot.

I would just uninstall it and install everything I use in a heartbeat, its just that some of the things I installed I dont have discs for or anything like that. What if I backup my registry and uninstall it... could I install the stuff back into the registry one I revert back to 98?

 

[medic]

Hmmmm
You may have a problem, I think what happens is that during the install over Win98, WinMe stores a copy of the W98 registry just before the install. If you uninstall WinMe it merely restores the saved registry and deletes all it's own installed files. That's why you need to reinstall any apps as the WinMe registry is now gone.
To keep your apps running which were installed into the WinMe registry, now that the registry is gone is going to be next to impossible.
I would save the program/files and folders and go on a hunt for all the dll's and vxd's ect. but adding back certain keys to the registry won't work as most entries need to be "registered" as they are merged.
You may want to check to see if the setup programs are still on the drive also.

 

[Mal007colm]

I uninstalled ME, it was too bad I thought I would like it but it locked up my system to often. I too receive the vmm32.vxd errors. How do you get rid of those?