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I’m creating an msi installer that needs to be able to upgrade an existing installation that was made using a non-msi installer. Since the installation itself is identical, this isn’t really too much of a problem, except that after an upgrade I’m left with entries for both msi and non-msi versions in the Programs & Features Control Panel. How can I remove the non-msi entry when I install the msi version?
That information is stored in HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\PRODUCTKEY
You can use a registry element with the removeKeyOnInstall attribute to remove it. However I caution you that in my experience it usually isn’t this simple. For example if you are installing to the same directory your uninstall may not work cleanly because of incorrect file reference counts. Also if the product was versioned correctly ( I’ve seen vendors ship two different DLL’s with the same version number many many times ) then the overwrite might not be as expected. Also you might have additional crud to clean up from the old install so just make sure it’s working as well as you expect it to work.