Some notes about Windows Desktop Search, well, for some people it may be a very good tool. I thought it should help me a lot to find my files. But wait, what a resource eater this WDS is, and really after 2 years of using it I didn’t become satisfactory with search results at all.
So I decided to uninstall it. Everything should be as always when you uninstall any MS program – simple, but really not for WDS.
I uninstalled it from “Add/Remove programs” control panel. OK, finished, restart. WDS doesn’t start and seems gone.
But later, when I pressed F3 in MyPC for file searching, and instead of standard simple windows search I SEE all again Windows Desktop Search, damn… Seems, it wasn’t full uninstall. Then I thought, I will install it again a fresh copy, and then I will uninstall. I downloaded an WDS EN 3.01 version from Microsoft website. Installed it. Going to remove in “Add/Remove Programs”, well…. it shows no WDS is installed (even with “Show updates” option). WTF. Though it clearly runs with my every computer start. So how to get rid of this thing without reinstalling all my pc??
Searching the google…
I found some information from Microsoft:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows/search/dtstshoot.mspx .
But man I didn’t install neither MSN search toolbars, nor other MS stuff, just WDS. Not useful information.
Found some instructions from Kotsar Andrew:
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1456784&SiteID=1 .
OMG you need to create a WDS uninstall information manually, because I didn’t find such uninstall information even in my Windows dir (it should be hidden system folder with $KB….). 
(.
But then again I found a very good instructions here:
http://www.davidarno.org/2007/10/26/how-to-remove-windows-desktop-search/ .
Well seems I am not the only one here with WDS. Luckily I had another computer with WDS installed and uninstall information present there. So you need to copy that information to your Windows directory (for WDS 3.01 it should be $NtUninstallKB917013$, hidden system folder ) and manually run spuninst.exe. Then it should uninstall.
