You receive an "Application has generated an exception that cannot be handled" error message when you remove SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services from your server

November 16, 2005

During a routine setup of SPS 03 (SharePoint Portal Sever 2003) I ran into an issue that required me to uninstall the SPS instance.

During the uninstall, I received this error once, and on another occasion a different error (reported under a different posting).

This article addresses this issue from MS Support - http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;827755

However, things are not always as straight-forward as they seem.

For this issue, I did uninstall WSS first – hosing up the ability to uninstall SPS. However, the simple fix? Re-install WSS, then uninstall SPS before uninstalling WSS.

Finally, after each uninstall – restart the server in question.

NOTE: I did not have to perform the \%ProgramFile%\ file removal or Registry edits noted in the MS Support Article. The uninstall process did remove those data for me – it was failing because WSS was no longer installed.

Hope this is helpful…