Have you ever had a setup program hang in the middle of the installation of an application? Sometimes, this messes up the installation information and you neither install nor uninstall the program. In those situations, Microsoft's Windows Installer Clean Up tool can be helpful. It can remove Windows Installer configuration information from a PC.
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You can launch the Windows Installer Clean Up tool by typing "clean" in the Start Search prompt. Don't confuse it with Disk Cleanup, the Windows tool to gain disk space.
A crashed installer program isn't the only reason why Windows Installer information can become damaged. The Windows registry can become corrupted or files in the Windows installer folder (C:\Windows\installer) can be inadvertently deleted. In these cases, uninstalling a program might fail.
By the way, you should not remove files from this folder manually, even though it can occupy a considerable amount of space on your computer. Some programs need the files there to work properly, for example, for updating or uninstalling an application.
However, you can remove orphaned patches from the folder with the msizap tool, which you will find in the Windows Installer Clean Up folder. The command "msizap.exe G!" removes superfluous data from the Windows installer folder.
If you desperately need file space on a system drive (and the Windows Disk clean Up tool didn't help), then you can also move the contents of the Windows installer to another place. You can copy the folder back later, if you have to uninstall programs. Just remember that some programs might not like this procedure. Check out this article for more information.
