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I'm sure that everyone knows about drive imaging applications, and how great they are for backup, and how much better they are than system restore. But they have one big glaring hole in them, that is if you make an image, install a program and use it for a while, going along and maybe saving new stuff, and then decide you want to cleanly remove the program.

We all know that most uninstallers that come with software are frankly almost useless, they tend to leave folders, and registry entries strewn about. So restoring an image would be great, if you almost immediately decided to "uninstall" the applicaton. But what if it's been a month? Losing everything back a month isn't too practical for most people.

So what fills the gap? Commercial uninstallers. And the best* one I've found is the oddly named Ashampoo Uninstaller Platnium Suite. It works very much like an old program I used to love with Win95 - Delta. What it does is it has a button you can press to install a program, you navigate to the installer.

Then Ashampoo makes a log of exactly what files are on your machine, and your registry. Then it runs the installer. Note - it's not interfearing with the installer, or trying to read what it does in real time like other uninstallers (which often break installs by doing this). Once the installer finishes, Ashampoo pops up a dialog to remind you to run the program once and then immediately exit it (from within the program, don't force kill it). Then it asks you to name the install log. Then it does another index of your entire machine (not an image, this index is a textual listing of your filesystem and registry, basically a meg or two) and does a diff on the before and after. This gets saved as a log file.

Later on, using the log file, Ashampoo can revert any changes made by the installed program to uninstall it. Because it only works on what was changed by that program, you don't affect anything else.

So far, it works great - the only complaint is there doesn't seem to be an easy way to convince it I don't want it's UI monitor running in my system tray to remind me to log an installation.

While I trial new software a lot, I don't install it often enough to need the monitor running all the time. So I have to manually right click, close it after an install.

NOTE to commercial devs in general - most programs should not have tray icons, or helper processes that run all the time. Users usually want the program to be like it wasn't even installed unless they are actively using it. Acrobat for instance does NOT NEED a tray icon running all the time, I don't view PDFs that often!

* EDIT: So - I've looked at some other uninstallers, and Total Uninstall won out - the 4 license for my family is far cheaper than getting Ashampoo for them, and has a right click option on installers as opposed to just trying to run all the time. Otherwise, it seems to work as good as Ashampoo, so I'm pretty happy.