1

When I look at the software that installed on our Network through the inventory it does not seem to be correct.

For example it shows that we have 120 copies of office 2003 and 120 copies of office 2007. We have actually removed 2003 of every machine in our network and installed 2007 via group policy.

At the moment spiceworks is detecting hundreds of old versions of software and it is making it impossible to keep track of licensing using spice works. Something I would like to do.

Is this due to the registry not being cleaned out correctly during uninstallation of the software?

3 Spice ups
2

Yep, mostly likely it is stuff stuck in the registry that is being exposed via WMI causing SW to think that the software is still installed.

3

This has been discussed many times here in the community.

Software vendors, especially MS, are know for leaving traces of applications in the registry after an uninstall. As SW gathers installed software from the Registry there is nothing in SW that can be done.

Try cleaning out your registry either manually or with a tool such as CCleaner.

4

Take a look at this guide, it might help figure out where to look on those machines and possibly help you fix it (a script could work if it is just registry entries).

http://community.spiceworks.com/help/Software_Overview

5

As a footnote - Spiceworks picks up software from the registry - HKLM\software

If it’s listed there - it will be picked up by SW.

As mentioned above - MS office leaves traces behinds after removal, so SW will pick it up until manually removed from the registry.

6

If you are using reporting there is a work wround. The false positives have a null value in the install date field. So if you do a where clause for Not Null in this field it won’t show the false positives.

7

Justin.Davison wrote:

If you are using reporting there is a work wround. The false positives have a null value in the install date field. So if you do a where clause for Not Null in this field it won’t show the false positives.

I had not noticed that Justin. Thanks for pointing it out.