There are a number of errors in Microsoft's article on removing WGA notifications.  Before I look at these, let me present the way I uninstalled it:

• Click Start > Control Panel
• Click Add or Remove Programs
• Click the Show updates checkbox (not present on my Windows XP Home installation until I installed XP SP2)
• Fire up Windows Explorer
• Click Tools > Folder Options ... and click on the View tab
• Uncheck Hide extensions for known file types (this is needed for the step where we rename WgaTray.exe, otherwise it will be renamed WgaTray.old.exe, although I guess that calling it WgaTray.old.exe would work) and click OK
• Rename %Windir%\system32\WgaLogon.dll
  to
  %Windir%\system32\WgaLogon.old
• Rename %Windir%\system32\WgaTray.exe
  to
  %Windir%\system32\WgaTray.old
• Reboot
• Click Start > Run, type:
  cmd
  Click OK and at the command prompt, type the following, and then press ENTER
  Regsvr32 %Windir%\system32\LegitCheckControl.dll /u
• Reboot
• Delete
  %Windir%\system32\LegitCheckControl.dll
  (the other two files listed in the uninstall article don't exist because they have been renamed earlier)
• Click Start > Run and type:
  regedit
  Locate and then right-click the following registry subkeys and click Delete:
  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\
CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Notify\WgaLogon

Ed Bott found two mistakes in the instructions contained in the Microsoft knowledge base:

• Add or Remove Programs is called Add or uninstall programs
• The instructions make no mention of checking the Show updates box on the Add or Remove Programs dialog box (Was the person who wrote this article using a version of Windows without SP2 installed?  The reason I say this is that it doesn't appear on versions without SP2 installed)

But there are more bugs. 

• For step 3 of the instructions, you can't rename WgaTray.exe to WgaTray.old without first making Windows show file extensions for known file types (it would be renamed to WgaTray.old.exe)
• On step 8, there is no WgaLogon.dll and WgaTray.exe to delete because they have already been renamed
• Step 10 duplicates the step to remove HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\ CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Notify\WgaLogon and adds a third subkey that doesn't exist

That's a lot of bugs for such a small and simple article.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 29th, 2006 at 14:04 and is filed under PC Doctor Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.