Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Hiding an entry in Add/remove programs applet of the Control Panel

Uhm... for some "odd" reason, I sometimes find myself  wanting to hide certain applications/programs from prying eyes even if they do scan my control panel...  There are various ways to do this but this is the method that I employ and will be sharing to you guys... I've been using this for years and I guarantee that it works on Windows XP...

Warning: the steps involved in doing this requires that you have a little knowledge of computer systems.  It is advisable that you do a backup of your registry prior to executing the steps laid out below.  Not doing so might have undesirable results on the performance and workings of your computer and in worst case scenarios, might cause a complete crash of your system... don't say I didn't warn yah!

Follow these steps:

    * Click Start, Run and type Regedit.exe
    * Navigate to the following location:

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Uninstall \ AnalogX Proxy  (note: Where AnalogXProxy is the name of the program you want to hide)

    * In the right-pane, create a new REG_DWORD value named SystemComponent
    * Double-click SystemComponent and set its data to 1

The AnalogX Proxy entry is now hidden. To make it visible again, delete the SystemComponent value that you created earlier.

More information:

In this example, the name of the sub-key was AnalogX Proxy, which is easily identifiable. In some cases, the sub-key names are not obvious, and there will be a list of GUID entries similar to the following:

    * {00000409-78E1-11D2-B60F-006097C998E7}
    * {1CB92574-96F2-467B-B793-5CEB35C40C29}
    * {2318C2B1-4965-11d4-9B18-009027A5CD4F}
    * {350C97B0-3D7C-4EE8-BAA9-00BCB3D54227}

In such cases, you can select the entry and look in the right-pane for the DisplayName string. The string tells you the name of the application concerned.

I hope this post was useful to you in some ways...

'Till my next mumblings...

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