Removing Adobe Shockwave from Multiple Computers

From time to time we get asked how to use BatchPatch to uninstall Adobe Shockwave from a group of computers. The good news is that it’s relatively simple and straightforward.

1. The first thing we need to do is locate the uninstall string in the registry on a computer that has Adobe Shockwave installed. Launch the Registry Editor by going to Start > Run > Regedit.
2. Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall and look for the Shockwave key. For older versions of Shockwave you’ll be searching through the many GUIDs that you see (ex: FF2A5498-4EFE-430F-A138-7EB365DBEBAD) for the REG_SZ called DisplayName. The DisplayNamevalue would contain a string that says something like Adobe Shockwave Player 11.1.
    
   However, newer versions of Shockwave actually appear under their own Adobe Shockwave Player key instead of a GUID key. In the screenshot below you can see that we have located the appropriate key.
   
3. At this point we need to identify the UninstallString value, which in this case for version 12.1.0.150 is "C:\Windows\system32\Adobe\Shockwave12\uninstaller.exe"
   
4. Now let’s find that “uninstaller.exe” and copy it to our BatchPatch computer. For the sake of clarity in this example I have renamed the exe to shockwave_uninstaller.exe. We are going to deploy it to the target computers and then execute it remotely to uninstall shockwave on our targets. Once you have a local copy of the uninstaller.exe, select the hosts in BatchPatch and choose Actions > Deploy software/patch/script/regkey etc. Select the uninstaller as shown in the screenshot below, and then click OK.
   
5. Finally, select Actions > Deploy software/patch/script/regkey etc > Execute deployment
   
6. We can see that we were successful when we receive Exit Code: 0 (SUCCESS). And of course if we look at the target machines, we will find that Adobe Shockwave has been successfully removed.