If there was one thing I emphatically did not want to do, it was install another kid's game on a computer I couldn't afford to be without. To a young child like my daughter Myopea, these games are an innocent amusement. To me, they're a disruption from the routine of life roughly equivalent to Hitler's invasion of Poland.

But my eight-year-old, Myopea, looked at me with those big eyes of hers, and I reluctantly took the box she was waving at me—Kuddly Koala's Kapital Kaper—and sat down at the PC.

"Can I play the game now?" Myopea asked.

I asked her to be patient while I installed the program. Amazingly enough, the installation went without a hitch.

"Is it ready? Can I play it now?" my darling daughter asked.

I was about to let her take over when Auntie Veronica's Anti-Virus popped up with an ominous message: "The installation program you have just run has violated the sacred sanctity of Auntie Veronica's Anti-Virus, and the only acceptable response is to stop working. To fix the problem, you must uninstall, then reinstall, Auntie Veronica's Anti-Virus. Please set aside half a day for the process."

"How 'bout now? Can I play it now?"

I turned to Myopea and calmly said "Honey, could you please leave the room while I fix the computer? I'll let you know as soon as the game is ready." At least that's what I think I said. But considering the way she ran out of the room screaming, it may have come out differently.

First Aid for the Hopeless

Whatever I may have said to get Myopea out of the room, I'm glad she wasn't there two minutes later. That's when I discovered that Auntie Veronica's Anti-Virus lacked an uninstaller. To be more specific, it lacked its own uninstaller, as it came as part of the ThinkYer Safe Internet security suite, and the only way to uninstall Auntie Veronica's Anti-Virus was to remove the entire package.

I launched the uninstaller, found a good book, and waited. Twenty minutes later, the system rebooted. Forty minutes after that, it rebooted again. After another fifteen minutes, it asked me if I wanted to uninstall ThinkYer Safe.

I can't tell you how long it finally took, but eventually I was told that with the next reboot, ThinkYer Safe would be gone. The message was an understatement. With the next reboot, Windows was gone.

With Windows now unbootable, I figured it was time to call ThinkYer Safe Technical Support. After the requisite half hour on hold, I got a human being and explained the situation.

"Gee, that's a new one," he said. "We haven't heard of that problem before."

"You haven't?"

"Nope. The only uninstaller problems we hear about concern the way it hides the boot partition, rendering Windows unbootable."

"That sounds like my problem," I told him.

"Okay, the answer is really simple. Reformat the hard drive and reinstall everything."

It was, of course, the answer I expected, but I was reluctant to go through all that again. I had reformatted my hard drive and reinstalled everything just a week before on orders of my ISP—their solution to a bad Ethernet cable. So this time I booted from an old DOS floppy and fixed the problem with FDISK.

Prepare for Reinstall

I gave my system a quick look-over before reinstalling ThinkYer Safe and Auntie Veronica's Anti-Virus. The programs hadn't loaded automatically. The shortcuts were gone from the Start menu. Add/Remove Programs no longer listed ThinkYer Safe as a program with an available uninstall program. It appeared as if the uninstall program had, amazingly enough, uninstalled the program.

So I put in the ThinkYer Safer CD and ran the install program. It asked me who I was. It had me pick and choose multiple complex options. It made me wait for twenty minutes as it copied several megabytes to my hard drive. Then it told me it couldn't go on because it had found an old version of ThinkYer Safe. Its recommendation? Uninstall it.

After I don't know how many hours of manually cleaning the Registry, rebooting, reinstalling ThinkYer Safe, rebooting, updating virus definitions, rebooting, setting settings, rebooting, scanning the hard drive, and rebooting, I was finally ready to try Kuddly Koala's Kapital Kaper again. I popped in the CD and watched what happened.

As I expected, the screen went blank, then came back with the Kuddly Koala logo—the resolution reduced to 640 x 480. I was about to look for the complex set of codes needed to close the game when an unexpected error message came up: "The installation program you have just run has violated the sacred sanctity of this Kuddly Koala product, and the only acceptable response is to stop working. To fix the problem, you must uninstall, then reinstall, Kuddly Koala's Kapital Kaper. Please set aside three days for the process."

I must have drifted off reading that message. When Myopea woke me up, I was asleep with my head on the keyboard. "Daddy? What happened? I just came down for a drink of water. Can I play the game now?"

I looked at my watch. It was 2:00 AM. "Honey," I said, "let's go outside and ride our bikes."