Who's the 17?

We are trying to do a silent uninstall of the "$UninstallManager".
We can't find a way to even remove it. Could you please provide us with the necessary parameters/information to silently uninstall the "$UninstallManager" itself and not only the component that it is set to manage. We have succesfully been able to silent uninstall of components controlled by it.

What? You want to remove a base operating component? You tards.

The $UninstallManager is a base component designed to allow clean removal under Windows; we don't support its removal. Why would you want to remove it? If your intention is to prevent users from installing components this can be done with Windows' Group Policy Editor.

And that should've been that.

Not half an hour later came the reply:

Dear Mr Canine,

Thank you for giving us the laugh of the day - our software distribution team is just shaking their heads.

No, we are not trying to prevent the users from installing components. Our software distribution team is not very keen on installing software on laptops that can't be removed again.

Please submit a bug report to fix this in an upcoming release.

What the...?

I rang them back to confirm the problem. It seems that when you install our software on any machine, the $UninstallManager is installed as well so that we can clean up all nice and tidy like. Except that the damned thing itself can't be removed without manual deletion and Registry hacking.

They get a Root Cause: 1-Bug, I get a friendly thank-you for sorting this quickly instead of doing the Bangalore Boogie, sending one pointless mail after another, and I've decided the Eng gets the 17 today.

x-posted to HuSi