Scripting

I used to use this method but ended up shying away from Win32 product because it takes a while, is disk intensive and once in a while would corrupt installations of other programs. http://csi-windows.com/toolkit/win32product-replacement
For MSI products I've switched to a powershell based method that looks for a displayname match in the Uninstaller portions of the registry, separates out the product GUID from the uninstallstring and then calls msiexec.exe /X {PRODUCTGUID} /qn (not all products like /norestart)

Here is an example from my VirtualBox Install script. You could easily make this logic a bit more modular to handle an array, multiple found instances, arguments or a variable for the Display name.

#Search the registry for present installs.
$ProductInstalled = Get-ChildItem -Path HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall, HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall |
Get-ItemProperty |
Where-Object {$_.DisplayName -like "Oracle VM VirtualBox*"}

# Remove present installs
if ($ProductInstalled){

If ($ProductInstalled.UninstallString) {
$uninst = $ProductInstalled.UninstallString
# strip away all but the product GUID, making it a value
$UninstallGUID = $uninst -replace '"',"" -replace "msiexec.exe /X|MsiExec.exe /I"
# Provide a list of arguments for MSIEXEC
$UninstallArguments = "/x $UninstallGUID /qn /norestart"
Start-Process -filepath msiexec.exe -argumentlist $UninstallArguments -wait
}

} - Kiyolaka 5 years ago