A warning about uninstallers – this time the MS Office one

Warning-DangerA little warning ...

Due to an issue with an Office Runtime installation on a Windows 2012 R2 Server, I decided to use this official Microsoft tool to remove all traces of MS Office: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Uninstall-Office-2016-Office-2013-or-Office-365-from-a-PC-9dd49b83-264a-477a-8fcc-2fdf5dbf61d8

However, it not only removed all traces of the Office Runtime, it wiped many of the exe and dll files across many folders in the Program Files and Program Files(x86) folders as well as some in the Windows System folder.

I have no idea why and haven’t had the time to delve into it ... but it reminded me of when I found that the Act! Uninstaller for v9 would wipe files in other programs' folders and in the Windows folder itself if it didn’t see Act! in the default install folder.

I just thought I'd post this to remind people to backup systems before running uninstallers. In my case, I can rebuild the VM pretty quickly, but would be less happy if this happened on a client system where not everything was as easy to restore.

 

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