I cannot uninstall NI-CAN 2.0

[mikeb]

I was getting a bluescreen error at boot time after installing NI-CAN 2.0 on a Windows 2000 machine with a PCI-CAN/2 card installed. So I decided to boot up in safe mode and uninstall NI-CAN 2.0.

Using "Add/Remove Programs", I tried removing the two NI items in the list: "NI-CAN 2.0" and "NI Measurement & Automation Explorer 2.2.0". In both cases, a dialog box was displayed with the title "National Instruments Installer" and the text "The installer is completing the uninstall. Please do not reboot while this dialog is being displayed. Currently uninstalling feature 2 of 3." The number of features was 2 for NI-CAN, 3 for NI Measurement. The numbers in the dialog box updated, appearing to uninstall all of the "features". But after
completion, the entry remained in the "Add/Remove Programs" list, and the files and registry entries were still present.

So how do I uninstall this mess?

[dhuff]

It might be better to remove using the NI-CAN install package. Most of the NI installers give you a dialog with Renistall,Repair, or remove options the second time the installer runs.
If the software is actually uninstalled, but the item remains in the Add/Remove list, you can try to manually remove it from the list or use a utility like tweakUI to remove it (free from the Microsoft site).
As for Registry entries, many installer leave keys behind, you just have to delete them manually.

[mikeb]

Tried that (running the same setup program I used to install) and removing was not presented as an option. The whole install/uninstall setup for NI-CAN 2.0 seemed not ready for prime-time -- big system font in windows instead of InstallShield type dialogs.

In the end I went through the registry and got rid of everything with "National Instruments" or "NI-CAN" or "NICAN", the National Instruments folder in Program Files, and nican*.dll and nipal*.dll from the SYSTEM32 folder. Cleaning the registry took forever, because 2.0 seems to register every individual file and dialog for every product.

Once I got things cleaned up, I installed NI-CAN 1.6 which went very smoothly.