Did you ever wonder why you can’t uninstall Pinball on a Windows XP machine? Pinball is an optional component of Windows XP. Most of these components can be installed or uninstalled with the Add/Remove Programs tool in the Control Panel. However, some of these apps don’t appear there.

Intelliadmin stumbled upon the solution to this mystery in a KB article. In %SystemRoot%\Inf\ Sysoc.inf some optional components are marked with “hide”. All you have to do is to remove the hide comment behind those components you want to show up. This will allow you to uninstall Pinball and some other optional Windows components.

This doesn’t work under Vista, anymore. But there are still some features which you can’t turn off using the Change and Uninstall tool in the Control Panel like WordPad, for example. Any idea how to get rid of them?

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