Complete newbie regarding Comodo Program Manager. Happened to see it while looking at the freeware page for Comodo Firewall.
Monitoring an install is good as long as InstallShield, MSI (Microsoft Installer service), or normal means are used to install a program. Some “installs” are merely downloading a .zip file, unpacking it, and moving the folder to where you want, and creating shortcuts in the Start menu, adding the folder to the PATH environment variable, or other manual steps to put the program on a user’s host. The user is just doing file copies, creating shortcuts, and modifying the env vars for which obviously CPM doesn’t monitor any of those. Later when the user wants to eradicate the program from their system, yes, they could reverse their manual steps if they remembered years later what they did to get the program on their host.
Zsoft’s Uninstaller is a snapshotting tool. You take a snapshot of your host to record its “Before” state. You install the program (whether manually or using an installer), and then take another snapshot after the installation to record its “After” state. The Before and After snapshots are compared to determine what changes were made to the host in the file system and in the registry. Of note is that the user must be careful not to run anything else other than the install between the Before and After snapshots to make sure some other install, config change, or data files don’t get recorded as the changes made by an monitored install. Then sometime later the user can use the normal uninstaller if one is listed in the Add/Remove Programs applet and follow with Zsoft Uninstaller to remove any remnant file & registry entries after the normal uninstall. If there is no normal uninstaller, as in the case of a manual “install” where folders and files were created by the user, Zsoft Uninstaller alone can be easily used to eradicate the program.
CPM will handle monitored installs, database monitored installs, and normal installs but it has no means for the user to take Before and After snapshots so the user can restore the host back to the Before state. This is NOT something that System Restore does and not its intended purpose. I’d like an option to have CPM drecord a monitored state change in the host using Before and After snapshots not only to provide a means of uninstalling something not normally monitored but just sometimes to see what changed. I have, for example, made a config change in a program and wanted to know where in the registry the change got recorded either to help myself or someone else resolve a problem or know where the config change was made. For example, rather than having to make a dummy entry for an exclusion in the Windows firewall with a unique name that I can then search on in the registry using regedit.exe, I could snapshot before, add the dummy entry, take a snapshot after, and have CPU show me where the registry change went. Of course, that means that I get to see a list of the differences discovered between the before and after states that it recorded and compared.