Removing Properietary Software

I do a little work for a company who provides me with software that I must use. They recently updated the program from a version 1.6 to a version 1.7 and told me to go ahead and update the software. I've tried several times and the program will not update. It just motors through the update way too fast. and when I restart, its still version 1.6. I called the company help desk and they were at a loss, so they sent me a new update disk. Still doesn't work. :-( So, I called them and told them about my problem. The Help Desk said they didn't know how to fix this problem and I would have to live with it (1.6), but the company will not accept my reports on version 1.6 documents, I need to send them stuff on the 1.7 documents, so no update, no work, no income… I asked them about a uninstall of 1.6 and a reinstall of 1.7 and the Help Desk stated I could try it, but they don't endorse the idea (huh???). So, I finally tried to do this but Version 1.6 will not uninstall. I manage to get it down to 1.71 MB of data, but it will not completely uninstall. I tried to re-install 1.7 over what was left of 1.6, but 1.7 will not install, and I no longer have version 1.6. I can temporarily put 1.7 on another computer, but I really need the software of the computer I use all the time. I've used the Microsoft Uninstall and Absolute Uninstaller, no luck, the program still hangs around. I've used the company's uninstaller, but that doesn't work either. Does anyone have any solutions? I am thinking about uninstalling in safe mode and then trying to reinstall, but will that work? I've also searched for every file with the company name in it and deleted it, but that hasn't made a difference. Any ideas are greatly appreciated.

Where ya at with this one, Russ?

After doing the manual hunt and delete, it is unlikely that any automated uninstall will be able to latch onto the application to perform an uninstall.

You may benefit from using the Windows Uninstall Cleanup Utility

It won't "remove files" from the application program itself, but will remove the "installation flags" from Windows OS, making the machine believe that neither 1.6 nor 1.7 has ever been installed.

Then you should be able to perform a fresh install of 1.7.

Read the information from MS carefully.
Do not allow the utility to remove information for any other applications except those of your company for 1.6 and 1.7.
If you do… those other programs will still run, but you will have future difficulty if you later need to uninstall or update.