Question:
How do I manually uninstall Delphi?
Answer:
When uninstalling a program it is best to use the utility Add/Remove Programs found in the Control Panel in Windows, but sometimes this does not work properly. Here is a guide to help you uninstall Delphi manually.
There are four major areas where you will need to delete: The Delphi directory, the Borland Shared directory, the System32 directory and the Windows Registry.
1. The Delphi directory is easy. Just go into Windows Explorer and delete the entire directory called Delphi5. This should be under the directories Program Files\Borland.
2. The Borland Shared directory has more then one possible location but the most common is Program Files\Common Files\Borland Shared. If you are removing all Borland software that uses the BDE from your machine (i.e. Delphi and C++ Builder) you may be able to just delete the entire directory. Be aware that there may be other programs that use the BDE such as Corel paradox. It may be a good idea to always leave the BDE directory unless you are certain.
3. The System32 directory is located in your operating system directory, for example WINNT\System32. It will be the trickiest because it contains many files and only a portion of them are used by Delphi. The key here is to look on your Delphi CD for the System32 directory to find which files to delete. The files contained under the Runimage directory on the CD are in more or less the same directory structure as they are on your machine. The main exception is that the Windows\System32 directory located under Runimage\Delphi50\ on the CD contains items that are actually contained in the OS directory on your machine.
One tip is that Delphi files of the same version have the same date and time, so if you go into the System32 directory and sort by 'Modified' you should be able to group all the Delphi files together so you can delete them all at once.
4. In order to make changes to the registry you must open to utility regedit.exe. Go to the Start menu and select run, then type 'regedit'. Once in the registry open the entry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Borland\Delphi. Right click on the version of Delphi you are deleting such as 5.0 and select delete. If desired remove other directories under here as well. Now you should simply do a search on the registry for 'delphi' and 'borland' and make your own judgment as to whether there are other entries you want to delete.
One final step you may want to take is to remove all the file extension associations with Delphi. If you did a search on the registry in step four then you may have already done this. It can be done by opening Windows Explorer and going to the menu View | Options. The extensions associated with Delphi 5 are: dfm, dpr, dpk and pas.
Last Modified: 24-OCT-00