After playing around with the free Poser 3 from 3D World Mag for several months, I just bought Poser 4 this week. Unfortunately, in attempting to prepare to install 4, I now find that I cannot uninstall Poser 3! When I try, I get a message that says "This login account does not have the required privileges to remove the selected application. Please use an administrator account." Well, this is on a Windows 95 B machine, and mine is the only account. I've tried logging in without using any username or password (just hitting ESC at the login prompt), but I get the same message when I try to uninstall Poser 3. So, is there any way for me to uninstall, short of just deleting the directory and leaving any other Poser 3 stuff strewn around my system? I hope someone here has an idea of how I can proceed, 'cause I sure was hoping to play around with Poser 4 this weekend ...

I"m unsure about Poser 3, but Poser 4 dinnae leave anything outside itself... I.E. .. nothing in the system files etc.. everything internal to it's own directories.. so.. in theory deleting the directories should take care of it... but.. as I said.. I'm unfamiliar with P3... it's the request for an administrator account that causes concern. 95B chouldn't give that error.. unless you're connected to a LAN....

You must have installed the Poser 3 update. There is a trick to uninstalling P3 after the update. I think that if you reload Poser 3 from the CD that you can then uninstall it.I can't remember for sure, but if that doesn't work, I'm sure that JeffH will be along soon with the right answer.

Yep, I did indeed install the 3.01 update. I'll hold off a little bit longer to see if JeffH happens to come by with the definitive answer. ;)

Before Poser 4 came in, I remember a lot of discussion saying that the Poser 3.01 upgrade was full of bugs and not to use it. If you merely delete a package's files, that will likely leave registry entries pointing to nothing, and as a result you can't reload the package afterwards, until you use a registry-cleaning program that removes bad pointers amd suchlike.

Yeah, that's how it's supposed to work. Reinstall from the CD wiping out the update then uninstall. This works for most, but not all. -JH.

The lack of ability to uninstall P3 is another gift from the people we used to love at MC who are now at CL. Each time I find something on my computer from P3 I consider it to be just another turd left on my computer's hard drive by the people who love me so.

Thanks to all who helped. Alas, the reinstall from the Poser 3 CD didn't work for me (I must be one of the unlucky ones). So I deleted the directory, removed the icons, and searched through the registry for occurrences of "Poser 3" and deleted those subtrees as well. After a reboot, most everything seemed to be more or less cleaned up, and I was able to install Poser 4 and get on with the fun. Thanks again!

If you want to make sure download "regclean" from www.zdnet.com(free Microsoft product) you'll be surprise at the stuff some program's you uninstall leave behind in the registry. It works automatically on win9598 and is very safe to use.

Also, Norton Utilities does an excellent job on such things as registry cleaning, and sooo much more, such as defragging in about half the time or les than Micro$oft's woefully inadequate disk defragmentor....

But, with Norton utilities, install ONLY the defragmenter and the Windows Doctor, and not the background shell that runs all the time under your Windows. That shell has extra feratures, like (I think) saving copies of overwritten files; but it is buggy and makes Windows act odd.