I had installed IE8 beta 2 and I am somewhat surprised by it. I like it but there are some bugs that are a little irritating. Mostly, I couldn’t use the pull down in the address bar. I had to keep retyping the addresses or use the history. Some websites could not be shown correctly. When I would close out the IE8 and restart it later, sometimes I would get the option to restore last session or go to home page. For some reason, the IE8 beta 2 keeps the iexplorer.exe process running in the task manager. I just recently uninstalled the beta and went back to IE7. If you are able to uninstall via the add/remove program, consider yourself lucky. Microsoft offers a a long way if you have XP SP3. It involves uninstalling the SP3, then uninstalling IE8 beta 2, then reinstalling SP3. The easier way is to navigate to you windows folder. When you open up your folder, you have to go to tools-folder options, click on the view tab, the uncheck “Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)” (click “yes” on the popup) and click on “Show hidden files and folders“. In your windows directory, you should see the “IE8” folder. Open that and then open “spuninst” folder. Then run the “spuninst.exe“. For most users, you navigation should be close to this: “C:\WINDOWS\ie8\spuninst\spuninst.exe”.
UPDATE: Several people have been unable to locate the uninstall directory for the IE8. Of course, this was written when the beta version was out. Anyway, in the C:Windows directory, there is a file called ie8.txt. Open that up and scroll to where it says “CreateUninstall Directory” line and it will tell you where the uninstall for the IE8 is. If you installed the final version of IE8, and cannot find anything, then you may have to go to the add remove programs and where you add or remove window features, uninstall the IE there.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=16a7ae3e-5b59-46f1-9337-9083a09b25ad)
related post
Wow, that is a very good tutorial!
RT
http://www.web-tools.us.tc
Yea but on service pack 3, some people do not have that folder, several people including myself tried this step but the folder and the command do not exist in the system.
is there any other way to locate this? and why the hell cant we find it on ours?
please if you have any idea on how to help me, email me at aodvamp@hotmail.com
cause i really don’t want to reinstall the whole damn deal after just getting settled again finally
alas the world is unfair, gotta take it as it is haha
cheers
Hi, do you have any information on how to uninstall xp sp3. sp3 is not showing up in add remove programs.
You can try here… c:\windows\$NtServicePackUninstall$\spuninst\spuninst.exe. You may have to go to folder options to show hidden folder and files and possibly uncheck the hide system files.
I have installed IE7 AFTER installing XP SP3 by going to Microsoft download page: http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9AE91EBE-3385-447C-8A30-081805B2F90B&displaylang=en
I could not do this via MS Update process since it would only offer me IE8 (not IE7). Now I am unable to uninstall IE7 via any of the standard methods.
MS blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/05/05/ie-and-xpsp3.aspx
has lots of details including: “…If you must uninstall IE7 after you have upgraded to XPSP3, then you have to first uninstall XPSP3, and then uninstall IE7. After this series of uninstalls, you will be reverted back to a XPSP2, and a stable version of IE6, so feel free to upgrade to XPSP3 again.
If you install IE7 after you install XPSP3, then you will be able to uninstall IE7 at any point and be reverted to the newer IE6 version that ships in XPSP3. The restriction on uninstalling only applies to when you install a Windows Service Pack release on top of a standalone IE release…”
This implies I should be able to uninstall IE7. However, I think the problem is that if you do not use the MS update process, then IE7 cannot be uninstalled. I did try installing IE8 via MS update process on another XP SP3 system and I could uninstall IE8.
Any ideas?
after searching various posts from MS MVP’S and most af all MS site for help I understood first off all that messing with MS apps is a dangerous game second MS people have no clues about their apps and third HERE Keith KNOWS what MS doesnt
THANK you for saving me from an unecesary windows reinstall
Was xpSP3 for months before getting ie8. Tried to uninstall ie8 but got a copy error (couldn’t find hmmapi.dll.mui – if you skip that one it still can’t find dozens of other subsequent files either). So, uninstalled sp3. Noticed that both ie7 and ie8 are in the add/remove programs list. Clicking remove on ie7 does nothing. Clicking on remove for ie8 (or doing the spuinst.exe) results in errors when the ininstall wizard can’t find the files it wants to copy. So, I can attempt to uninstall 2 different ways but both result in an impass. What can I try next?