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NOTE: This How To involves editing the system registry. Please, make sure you make a back up of your registry before any registry editing procedures.

Sometimes when you uninstall a program, the corresponding in the Control Panels Add/Remove Programs applet may not be removed.

This can be due to incomplete uninstallation or the poorly designed uninstaller itself. To remove the invalid/orphaned entries from the Add/Remove applet manually read on:
Start Registry Editor (click on start then Run and type Regedit then press enter).
Navigate to the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Uninstall
Look for the name of the program with the orphaned entry
Delete the entire listing for the software with the orphaned entry
Close the Registry Editor
If there are some {GUID} sub-keys under the Uninstall key.
Each {GUID} represents a software product that you’ve installed. Under the above key, click each {GUID} entry and verify the DisplayName shown in the right-pane. Once you locate the item that you want to remove from Add/Remove Programs, backup the entry to a REG file and then delete the key.

Example:
PC Inspector File Recovery has the GUID {0DD140D3-9563-481E-AA75-BA457CBDAEF2}
[HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uni nstall\{0DD140D3-9563-481E-AA75-BA457CBDAEF2}]
“DisplayName”=”PC Inspector File Recovery”

Orphaned entries are those whose uninstallers are not available but the registry entry might point to the actual uninstaller file. You may also see errors like “missing install.log or uninstall.log” while trying to uninstall from Add/Remove Programs. The install.log / uninstall.log contains the uninstallation information about a program. When you remove a program from Add/Remove Programs, the log files come into play and remove the corresponding software entries from the registry and the files in the hard disk.

If the LOG files are missing, you may need to reinstall the application again (in the same path) and then try a clean uninstall again. In some cases, the application might be removed, but the entries may still exist in the Add/Remove Programs list. Orphaned entries are usually a result of a system restore rollback operation. Use the above method to remove the Uninstall entries.