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We’ve been using Spiceworks (now on the latest version) for a few years now and have a decent history of our desktop PCs, including their installed Software. We’re currently working on switching our Antivirus software and using the reporting to see which systems still need to be updated. This led to discovering an inconsistency in what is listed in the Software tab for each device (and thus what shows up on my report). The problem is it that Spiceworks is still showing that programs are installed even after they were removed (or updated to a new version, so both versions show in the list). I verified they were gone by looking in Add Remove Programs, the Registry, and the hard drive. In most cases there was no reference to the old program, yet Spiceworks insisted it was installed.

On a whim I then clicked on the Rescan option when looking at the system in Spiceworks and low and behold the software list changed and the phantom stuff disappeared?! So, is this by design? I sure hope not! Why aren’t my regular scans updating these systems? It seems to do so for the other 90% of computers…

1 Spice up
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I have also noticed the exact same symptoms in my environment.

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Have you already tried following at least steps #1 through #, before running a full scan, of this How-To ?

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Another thing you may want to do is get the Removal Tool from the company of the AV software you’re trying to remove.

We recently removed AVG in favor of Vipre and quickly found that just using add/remove programs to uninstall AVG didn’t do a thorough job. Running Grisoft’s removal tool on the workstations cleaned them up.