Remove Program Failure, NSIS and uninstall.exe errors

Hi all, So I'm playing tech support for some friends and they have seriously mangled their systems. Naturally no restore disks and they managed to corrupt their HP Recovery partition. So instead of just nuking this thing I actually have to fix it. Anyway, Add/Remove Programs throws either the dreaded NSIS error or the windows "Uninstall.exe has enocutnered an error and needs to close" I know that the NSIS error occurs if the installer is borked (corruption, virus, et al) and I'm guessing the same sort of problem is at the root of the uninstall.exe errors, but all the help sites I've read talk about how to either re-download an installer or use a command line command to skip the error check on install. But I don't want to install, I want to uninstall. There are 50+ apps that shouldn't be on this box, most of them in chinese so I can't readily find and download their installers. I just need to get all this carp** off their machines. Is there an easy way to complete an uninstall even if I'm getting these errors using the WIndows add/remove programs tool?

Try the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility, see if that does the trick.

More info available here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301