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How to fix Error 1714: The older version of ... cannot be removed

It is several years since I last reinstalled my PC and it shows. I used to keep the setup program for the downloaded software in a download directory but I do not do it anymore as:

• it wastes space


• it only takes a few seconds/minutes to download the latest version from the web.

But installing from a "temporary" directory causes one problem: some programs cannot be uninstalled as they are unable to find the original setup so they return "Error 1714: The older version of … cannot be removed". :-(

This is bad design if you ask me. If you need something from the original setup, either you copy the stuff you need to your application directory or you tell me that I have to save it somewhere for the future. Downloading the latest version from the web does not help as you need the particular setup program you installed with :-( :-(

Being stuck with tons of old software on my PC I cannot uninstall is bad enough. But, what really bugs me, is that some software cannot be installed unless you uninstall the old version. I tried to install the new version of Virtual PC and I got this message since I had Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 installed already:

Error 1714. The older version of Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 cannot be removed.

I was considering using RegMon to see which registry keys the VPC2007 setup uses when I found the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility. It does not uninstall the application as such, it just removes it from the list of applications that Windows thinks is installed. Ugly, but it fixed the problem for me.

Select the software you want to "uninstall" from the list, click Remove and hope for the best: