Pankaj,
I have had this happen to me twice on desktop PC's, and twice on my Laptop. I believe my collegues have had this same problem occur on their desktop PC's, and I know for certain of one instance of a collegue having this occur on his laptop.
The first instances that I encoutered were when I tried the "National Instruments Software" selection in the Add/Remove programs listing in the Control panel. I selected the "Remove" option with everything selected on both of the first two attempts, and in both cases the hard drive was incapacitated. I believe one of these occurred when attempoting to uninstall the files that were installed with NI-VISA 4.1, and I am certain that one occurred with NI-VISA 4.2. (See the attached screen capture for the panel I am referring to.)
After everything was uninstalled, I rebooted on the prompt, and the system came up with a momentary blue screen, followed by the message indicating that Windows failed to come up normally. Any option that was selected (Safe Mode, Safe Mode with command prompt, last known good configuration, etc.) gave the same failure indication. Attempts to read the hard drive from another device (one of those USB boxes you can install a drive in for an external hard drive) were unsuccessful as well. Nothing on the disc is recoverable.
The very first attempt was on a PC I had been using for quite some time. (The reason I was attempting to un-install the NI-VISA software was that I was trying to support a customer that was having some issues with our hardware using an older version of NI-VISA, and I was trying to reproduce his system configuration.) I would have a difficult time with all of the specific details of what had been installed, but the second time was on a system that I had received from our IT manager. It had the OS (WinXP) and Symantic Anti-virus installed, and had whatever initial settings were required for the PC to be network compatible. I installed the NI-VISA and NI-VXI software on it, then attempted to un-install. This was something of an experiment to see if the reason for the first crash was due to some compatibility issue.
I don't know about the specific configurations of the systems my collegues experienced this on, but I know they were all WinXP with the most current service packs installed. All of our work stations are set for automatic updates, so again, it would be difficult to be specific about what the exact software settings were.
The latest instance of this occurred yesterday when I was trying to remove all of the VISA software from my system. After the previous crash (about two months ago) I had installed some files in the wrong order, so my file paths were inconsistant with another system I regularly work on, and I wanted them to be the same. One of my collegues told me that he had successfully removed NI-VISA from his laptop by removing only one entry at a time, then re-booting his system before removing the next entry. I believe his attempt was to uninstall ONLY the NI-VISA files, not everything, so the reason he had success may have been due to the fact that he left the "NI PXI Platform Services for Windows" entry intact.
On my system, I had successfully removed all of the VISA specific entries, and TestStand and its associated entries. When I removed "NI PXI Platform Services for Windows" the system failed to re-boot. The laptop had been rebooted successfully after each removal prior to this.
I will address your questions as they relate to this latest instance of this problem:
1.) Was there any specific hardware present in the system?
A: This is a standard Dell Experion 1520 laptop, with no hardware added to it. The only change from the original manufactured condition is that I recently replaced the hard drive after a recent crash due to uninstalling the NI software.
2.) What type of machines have you seen this problem on?
A: Twice now on this laptop (I had to replace the hard drive after the first instance, as it was left unrecoverable) and once each on two different PC's. I know of one instance from a collegue that had this same problem on his laptop, and a couple of possible instances on other PC workstations.
3.) Does this always happen during uninstall or are there times when the uninstall is successful?
A: It has happened every time I tried it. The latest attempt did not fail until I attempted to remove the entry "NI PXI Platform Services for Windows".
4.) Was this always on Windows XP?
A: Yes. There have been at least five instances of this that I am aware of (I believe there are at least two others, but I don't recall the specifics, or if I am merely mixing up a different issue, but these five are confirmed), on four seperate computers (two different desktop PC's, once on my collegues laptop, and twice on my laptop). All were WinXP systems.
