Program Removal Rules

Installed Program Rules are used by dUninstaller and KillEmAll (Remove Programs and Remove Store Apps tabs)

Basics:

A “whitelist” rule is designed to ignore ALL matching programs, leaving them out of the results listing.

A “blacklist” rule is designed to flag all matching programs for the uninstall listing.

All rules are designed to match any partial or complete pattern of text, when compared against both the Program Name as well as the Program Publisher.

Examples:

* Do not use single/double quotes in rules unless you want to match specifically for quoted text.  Double quotes are used here only to wrap example text patterns.

Rule Text “Microsoft Office”
Matches ALL programs with “Microsoft Office” in the name, e.g. “Microsoft Office 2003“, “Microsoft Office 2007“, etc.

Rule Text “Microsoft .NET Framework”
Matches ALL programs with this in the name, e.g. ‘Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5.1‘ or ‘Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5.2‘

Rule Text “Microsoft”
Matches ALL programs where the Program Name or Publisher contains “Microsoft“,
e.g. “Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5.2” (Program Name) or “Microsoft Corporation” (Publisher)

If you need the rule text to end in a SPACE character, you can put a pipe “|” character after the space on the end of the text.  For example:

Rule Text “Microsoft .NET Framework |”  (with a space and pipe on the end)
Matches “Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5.2” (because of the space between the last word and the version number)
It will NOT match “Microsoft .NET Framework” (without a space on the end)

You can also put your own notes after the pipe “|” character, and they will be ignored by the program.  For example:

Rule Text “Microsoft .NET Framework| this is a thing I want removed because …”
Matches both “Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5.1” and “Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5.2“

Usage Scenarios:

One real-world scenario is (as above) to whitelist “Microsoft” and therefore all programs with “Microsoft” in the Program Name or Publisher would be ignored, leaving you a list of only non-matching entries, making it easier to sort through.

Another real-world scenario is to blacklist “Adobe Flash” if you wish all versions of Adobe Flash to be flagged for removal, due to it’s associated security issues.

Finally, you may only wish to remove only old versions of a program (e.g. Java) but not newer versions, therefore you would include the older version numbers in several blacklist rules (e.g. two rules, one for “Java 6” and one for “Java 7” would match Java 6.0, 6.5, 7.0, 7.1, etc. but leave Java 8.x)