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Veil-Project / veil

Veil-Project
MIT License
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Windows registry keys not being removed on uninstall. #278

Open seanPhill opened 5 years ago

seanPhill commented 5 years ago

A user reported that after uninstalling the wallet the custom directory was not set back to default.

It was discovered that the Windows Registry keys remained after the uninstallation.

I tested this on Windows 10 64-bit, firstly checking the Registry and exporting keys from HKCU and HKLM. There were three sections:

  1. [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Veil\Veil-Qt] containing all of the settings
  2. [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Veil Core (64-bit)] containing the program file location
  3. [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Veil Core (64-bit)] also containing the program file location and a components entry.

I then uninstalled the Veil Wallet, checking the progress log. I didn't see anything about removing registry keys, only files, but upon refreshing I saw that the second Registry key set above was removed, while the two other main sets of registry keys remained.

When uninstalling a Windows program, Registry keys should be removed for a clean uninstallation.

A workaround for a user, not requiring them to open the Windows Registry Editor is to save these four lines in Notepad as 'UnRegVeilWallet.reg' or similar, and then double click it and okay the changes to the Registry.



[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Veil Core (64-bit)]

[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Veil]

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Veil Core (64-bit)]```
seanPhill commented 5 years ago

If you just want to do this for practice, just remember that if you export the keys first you can put them all back again by double clicking the exported keys .reg files, otherwise you will need to reinstall the wallet from the installer EXE file.