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Question:

Uninstall ActiveX bundle Windows 8.1

Sep 28 '15 at 03:20

I am looking for advice on how to uninstall ActiveX bundle on Windows 8.1. Version to uninstall is 5.3.3. There is no Chilkat listed in Programs & Features etc.


Answer

Dirk, there is no actual "install" with the Chilkat ActiveX. The Chilkat ActiveX is provided w/ the DLL in a .zip that is downloaded. It is "installed" by registering the DLL with regsvr32. The Chilkat ActiveX is a standard ActiveX DLL, that registers via regsvr32 like any other ActiveX. "Uninstalling" is simply to unregister. (regsvr32 -u <path-to-dll>)

ActiveX registration is just a glorified, over-complicated, problem-riddled, pain-in-the-ass way to map a name to the path of the DLL. ActiveX registration creates Windows registry entries to essentially store the name and path. A program instantiates an ActiveX via a CreateObject statement (or some language construct that boils down to a CreateObject), where the string passed to CreateObject (such as "Acme.Widget")is looked up in the registry to find the path of the DLL to load.

One way to remove the ActiveX is to delete the DLL file. One could then run a registry cleaning program, which I'm sure would cleanup ActiveX registration entries that point to non-existent files.

You could manually remove the registry entries via regedit. Look in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/Chilkat* You can remove those entries. Each ActiveX has a CLSID. Look in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/CLSID/{...} for the given CLSID. You can remove those entries. The "regsvr32 -u" command removes these registry entries. If you have the DLL, you can remove it that way.

Remember: Chilkat did not come with an "install program". It is a developer tool that is meant for software developers. The developer "installs" and "uninstalls" by registering/unregistering the ActiveX. An application developer may include a Chilkat ActiveX in his application install, and in that case the particular application installer/uninstaller would (as part of it's install/uninstall) register and unregister any ActiveX's it includes. (Of course, if other unrelated programs are using the same ActiveX, this might be problematic if the Chilkat ActiveX suddenly disappeared.)

Now.. having said all that... Chilkat is considering to provide the ActiveX in a .msi. The main reason is to eliminate the countless pitfalls encountered by developers in trying to manually register/unregister the DLLs. See http://www.cknotes.com/chilkat-activex-msi-installers/