Windows 7: Remove InstallShield Update Manager

The InstallShield Update Manager (ISUM) had somehow installed itself on my system.  It would sometimes appear in my system tray, and would also pop up messages telling me that I needed to install updates.  I wanted it gone.

I ran a search and found a Flexera Software webpage that offered a link to a SoftwareManagerUninstall.exe program.  I ran that uninstaller and was greeted with a question:  "Are you sure you want to remove the FLEXnet Connect Software Manager?  Odd question; I hadn't installed any such thing.  Logically, though, it couldn't hurt, so I said sure, do it.  A moment later, it said the software manager had been removed from my system.  I was glad for that.  But the ISUM icon was still in my system tray, and when I double-clicked on it, it informed me that it was currently updating two important programs, namely, ON-OFF Charge B10.0427.1, which I had never heard of, and the InstallSheild Update Manager itself.  Marvelous.

The idea seemed to be that there were different versions of the ISUM, depending on which program installed it on my system, which would explain why various sites pointing me toward specific registry entries didn't work for me -- and I couldn't just delete all references to InstallShield, because all kinds of programs used that as their installer.  I went into Control Panel > Programs and Features to verify that, as I recalled, the InstallShield Update Manager was not listed there.  With the aid of a thread, I found that C:\Program Files\Common Files\InstallShield\UpdateService\ISUSPM.exe was the operative program -- running the Update Manager, I mean -- but somebody said that deleting that wouldn't solve the problem; it would just be reinstalled by the related registry entries at some point.  There was the option to set it not to check for updates, but somebody in that thread said it would then pop up to remind me that I had set it to not remind me.

I ran a better search and got a suggestion to use Autoruns instead of Start > Run > msconfig to identify ISUM as a starting program and untick it.  But before trying the Autoruns/msconfig route, I did a Ctrl-F in Start > Run > regedit for ISUSPM.exe.  This gave me the idea to delete the C:\Program Files\Common Files\InstallShield\UpdateService folder and then run Glary Registry Repair to wipe out references to it.  Thanks to previous tweaks (see links above), I was already running as administrator with about as much freedom as I could persuade Win7 to give me, so I figured the only thing left to do, before I could delete that folder, would be to use my right-click Lockhunter option to free it up in Windows Explorer.  That didn't work, though, so I tried deleting the contents of C:\Program Files\Common Files\InstallShield\UpdateService individually.  Everything went except issch.exe.  For that, I got an error:

File In Use
The action can't be completed because the file is open in InstallShield Update Service Scheduler.

So I went into Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) > Processes tab, highlighted issch.exe, and clicked End Process.  That took care of that.  (When I tried this on another machine, I also had to use Task Manager to shut down agent.exe, ISUSPM.exe, and one or two other processes.)  Then I closed Task Manager.  Now I could get rid of the folder.  I ran Glary.  I was watching one of the references to ISUSPM.exe in regedit, and it did not change when Glary was done, so I rebooted, ran Glary again, and did another search in regedit for ISUSPM.exe.  That reference was still there; so, maybe, were others.  I wasn't sure what to do about that, so I left it alone for a while.

Nothing further emerged, so I left things as they were.  The InstallShield Update Manager seemed to be gone.  There was still an InstallShield Program Updates icon in Control Panel, though.  I got rid of that by going to C:\Windows\System32.  There, I clicked on the Type heading (in Windows Explorer) to sort by that field, scrolled down to the .cpl (Control panel item) files, and deleted ISUSPM.cpl.  The icon was still in Control Panel, but I thought maybe it would go away after a reboot.  That may have been correct.  When I checked a week later, it was gone.

Ubuntu 10.04: Problems with Update Manager and Software Sources

As described elsewhere, I was in the process of upgrading from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).  I went into System > Administration > Update Manager.  At first, the system reported that I was up to date, as it often would do even when the system was terribly out of date.  I clicked Check and wound up with a message indicating that there was a problem with a repository.  I looked into System > Administration > Software Sources > Other Software.  The error message didn't make sense in light of what I saw there.  I tried Update Manager again.  This time it worked:  it was ready to install a bunch of updates for 9.10.  I skipped that and instead told it to upgrade the system to 10.04.  It did.

I ran Update Manager again, just to be sure.  Now I got the repository error message mentioned above.  It said this:

W: Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/lucid/Release.gpg.  Could not resolve 'us.archive.ubuntu.com'

There were a bunch of other, similar messages after that one, referring to other "Failed to fetch" problems.  I closed Update Manager and went into Software Sources, to see what this was about.  The sources listed there did not make sense, given that System > About Ubuntu reported that I was indeed running 10.04.  I checked them all -- the 9.10 CDROM, two "Unsupported updates" entries, and the http://archive.canonical.com/update karmic entries.  I went through the other tabs in Software Sources, while I was there, and made a few other changes, and then closed out.  It checked for updates and again gave me an error:

Could not download all repository indexes
The repository may no longer be available or could not be contacted because of network problems . . . .

followed by similar "Failed to fetch" messages, e.g., "Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/lucid/main/i18n/Translate-en_US.bz2 Connection failed."  Before attacking that, I decided to take care of the next of my previous posts on the whole upgrade and tweaking process.  This post had to do with installing a PAE kernel to take advantage of all of my RAM.  This was just a matter of searching for PAE in Synaptic and selecting and installing linux-generic-pae and linux-headers-generic-pae.  But that process failed with, again, some "Failed to fetch" messages.  This time, though, the messages said something about "Got a single header line over 360 chars" and "Bad header line."

So, OK, I was going to have to fix this repository problem before going any further.  I ran a search and came up with Salamane Moustapha's To-Do List After Installing Ubuntu 9.10.  The first thing on his list was to expand the software repository list.  That was actually the very next thing in my own sequence of previous posts, so I went to that one.  It called for installing Ubuntu Tweak, which I had already downloaded, and then running it from Applications > System Tools.  I went down the list in Ubuntu Tweak, making various adjustments.  When I got to the Source Center option, there were no sources listed.  This was no surprise; I had removed all those old ones from Software Sources, and now there was nothing left.  I moved on to the next Ubuntu Tweak item, Source Editor, and here I saw a number of repositories listed.  These seemed to be the ones actually active on my system at this point, as represented by the Ubuntu Software tab in Software Sources.  So far, in other words, Ubuntu Tweak was not solving all of my problems.  The only other things I changed in Ubuntu Tweak at this point were under Default Folder Locations, Manage Scripts, and Nautilus Settings.

Moustapha's To-Do List gave me a large set of repositories.  I was going to follow his instructions and just replace my sources.list with his.  His list was for Ubuntu 9.10, so I figured I would wind up deleting or modifying some from his list.  Then I rediscovered the Ubuntu Sources List Generator, and used that instead.  I didn't select any source code items, and in the Third Parties list I only chose GetDeb, Google Linux Software Repositories, MediaInfo, Medibuntu, Themes, Wine, and X Updates.  There were lots of other interesting programs there, but I thought it might be simpler to just install them via Synaptic as I needed them.  I clicked "Generate List."  Then, in Terminal, I typed "sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list."  I deleted its contents and copied their generated list over into it.  I saved and closed that and then copied and pasted, into Terminal, their supplied list of commands to get keys.  The first one, for GetDeb, produced an error:  "gpg: no valid OpenPGP data found."  The solution there was to execute the command with "sudo" in front; so I typed "sudo -i" to eliminate further recurrences of that problem in this session.  The next command provided by the Ubuntu Sources List Generator was "sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys F9D8BC54."  This one produced these errors:

gpgkeys: HTTP fetch error 7:  couldn't connect to host
gpg: no valid OpenPGP data found.

A search for that specific key number (F9D8BC54) turned up nothing.  I skipped that command for the moment and went on to the next.  This one was for Medibuntu.  It gave me five error messages.  One was for medibuntu itself, and it went like this:

W: GPG error: http://packages.medibuntu.org/ lucid Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 2EBC26B60C5A2783

The other four were of the same form, but they referred to http://ppa.launchpad.net/ and their public keys were 61260473F9D8BC54 (see above), 6E871C4A881574DE, 5A9A06AEF9CB8DB0, and 3B22AB97AF1CDFA9.  These four (but not the Medibuntu one) repeated again at the end of the installation.  Despite these errors, I ran the next command.  This one referred to key 881574DE, which seeems to have been one of the several just listed.  It seemed that maybe the Ubuntu Sources List Generator had gotten things out of order -- that perhaps I should have run this key request first.  But no, it gave me the same error messages as above, regarding HTTP fetch error 7 and no valid OpenPGP data.  Same thing for the final two commands supplied by the Ubuntu Sources List Generator, regarding keys F9CB8DB0 and AF1CDFA9.  Searches for these led to the suggestion to use this command (inserting, here, the full numbers from above):

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 2EBC26B60C5A2783 61260473F9D8BC54 6E871C4A881574DE 5A9A06AEF9CB8DB0 3B22AB97AF1CDFA9

But this still gave me the "HTTP fetch error 7."  A post from Oscar said that, in his case, the desired repository had been installed nonetheless.  In Software Sources > Authentication tab, I saw that I had keys for GetDeb, Google, and Medibuntu, from those that I had requested, along with Ubuntu Archive, Ubuntu CD Image, and Launchpad PPA, which came first in the list and which, I guessed, had been there before I made this request.  So the Authentication tab was not telling me that the others had been installed.  But Software Sources > Other Software did list them all, so in that sense I did seem to have added them successfully.  I posted a question on this and let the matter sit.  I went back to Update Manager, and this time it ran OK.  I ran it again, but unfortunately this time I got "the public key is not available" error messages for those same items again.  So I had not solved that problem.  I did not proceed further with this effort.  Instead, this and other problems prompted me to reinstall Ubuntu 10.04 from scratch.

GPG Error - Public Key Not Available

In 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope), I received this message after clicking the Check button in (System > Administration >) Update Manager:

W: GPG error: http://deb.opera.com stable Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY F9A2F76A9D1A0061

The recommended solution was to type this into Terminal:

gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv [last 8 characters of code]; gpg --export --armor [last 8 characters of code] | sudo apt-key add

In my case, as shown above, those last eight characters were 9D1A0061, so that's what I entered into the command just given. This gave me a message, "gpg: requesting key 9D1A0061 from hkp server keyserver.ubuntu.com." But then we went no further: after several minutes, I got this message:

gpg: keyserver timed out gpg: keyserver receive failed: keyserver error [sudo] password for ray: gpg: WARNING: nothing exported

and then it just seemed to hang there. So I tried a different approach. Although "apt-key update" was supposed to work, it didn't; it gave me this:

gpg: can't access `/etc/apt/trustdb.gpg': Permission denied gpg: fatal: can't init trustdb: trust database error secmem usage: 0/0 bytes in 0/0 blocks of pool 0/32768

Continuing, then, with what looked like an earlier approach at that same webpage, I tried this:

gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net --recv-keys F9A2F76A9D1A0061 sudo apt-key add /root/.gnupg/pubring.gpg apt-get update

. . . using, in other words, the full key from the error message in the first of these three command line entries. This approach appeared to be working better: the first line got me an indication that a key had been imported. But the second line ("apt-key add ...") resulted in an error: "gpg: can't open `/root/.gnupg/pubring.gpg': No such file or directory." I was still getting the error when I clicked "Check" in Update Manager. A comment added to the instructions cited above suggested using this:

sudo apt-get install debian-archive-keyring

but I still got the same error in Update Manager. Another comment said this would work:

apt-key list apt-key del [last 8 digits of key shown as expired in the apt-key list output] [repeat this del command for each such expired key] dpkg –purge debian-archive-keyring apt-get install debian-archive-keyring

I got tired of typing "sudo" in front of each line, so I just typed "sudo -i" and then started down this list. I only got to the first command: it appeared that I didn't have any expired keys. So this wasn't the fix for me. Still another suggestion from the comments in that same webpage:

sudo apt-get update -o Acquire::http::No-Cache=True

This ran, and then advised me to run apt-get update. I ran that twice, but still got that same message about the Opera key, and the same error message persisted when I ran Update Manager. From a Debian page that I located by doing a search for the specific NO_PUBKEY error message (above), I got this:

wget -O - http://deb.opera.com/archive.key | sudo apt-key add -

and that seemed to solve the problem.