Sven Littkowski wrote:
> Many other smart installations, or let's say, de-installations recognize 
> easily that there are files in a folder which don't belong to the program 
> itself (user-made files).
> 
Yeah. Despite having diminished sympathy for actually making this 
mistake (and not knowing it was one), I have to agree here. Most 
uninstallers/installers will *only* effect the files that they original 
placed. Other files, which might have been added later, are left alone. 
A few, though very few, will tell there is something there, and ask if 
you want to removed anyway. None of them do the smart thing, and offer 
you a look at the files it can't recognize, so you can decide if you 
want them a) left alone, or even b) moved. All in all, some of this 
stuff would be semi-trivial, but the bone headed assumption of 99.9% of 
all installers is, "This is a clean install, on a new machine, so I can 
do any damn thing I please with it." At best *some* are smart enough to 
leave things alone, in case you need to reinstall the application, to 
fix something, but even that isn't always helpful, since, unless if 
generates a backup of the original contents (which is places in its own 
directory, instead of some place the average person could do something 
with them), it may not "fix" the problem at all, if the problem is in a 
file that it ignores intentionally, like settings files.

All in all, the compromises made on Windows, especially after Vista came 
along, as a bloody mess, and most installers simply aren't smart enough 
to tell when/if they are about to hose something important, or their 
installation will, in the case of repair, actually fix anything.

But, in the end.. You messed up Sven, badly, and no one in the IT 
industry would have a lot of sympathy for how. I make similar mistakes 
out of laziness myself, and the fact that the backup system I do have is 
an intentionally brain damaged one that came with my external, which 
some times won't even complete, if it decides it doesn't like *one* file 
  some place. It also won't back up critical settings, or the like, or 
documents it doesn't recognize. Replacing it though, would cost me money 
and time, but if I lost everything, I would blame my own stupidity, not 
POVRay's installer.

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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