The long, arduous road to
SUCCESS!
(for me, anyway)
For those like myself whove followed the advice on this board and from Atari but still cant re-install Civilazation III Complete, well, heres what worked for me:
Back up that registry (and everything else you can) before attempting this. Its too stinkin easy to scrap the wrong file when your bleary-eyed and in the middle of deleting hundreds of entries. If you have other Atari/Infogrames/Civ3 mods and titles installed on your system then be aware that the following actions will undoubtedly destroy them unless you know exactly what youre doing and what to look for. And if you do blow out your system? Well, thats what backups are for. Lastly, perform this at your own risk since Im no computer guru and cant possibly foresee what will happen on other systems with different configurations and software. Hey, Im not even sure about my own setup.
Still interested? Then here we go:
For starters, I used XPs search function for hidden files using the keywords, Atari, Infogrames, Civ3 & Civilization. Yes, a few files were found and then deleted, but Civilization III Complete remained listed in Add/Remove Programs and the re-install still didnt take. Then I performed the same searches in RegEdit.
I launched RegEdit and used the Find and Find Again commands with the following terms:
Atari
Infogrames
Civ3
Civilization
Loads of entry hits from across the registry took hours to remove. I deleted entire folders if they essentially contained nothing but Civilization III Complete keys. If the folder housed other information, Id simply delete Civilization references and leave the rest of the folders contents intact.
Far and away the largest deposit of Civilization III Complete entries was located in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\S-1-5-18\Components. Deleting entries from this location alone took me somewhere between one and two hours. Civilization III Complete disappeared from Add/Remove Programs and Civ3 finally re-installed perfectly nor did it ask to be removed during the installation process. I havent used any patches or installed any mods yet, but the game does load properly. The rest of my system (so far) is perfectly stable. Ill leave any subsequent game problems to another day, if and when theyre found.
Now heres my question for others to answer: Keeping in mind that fixes from this board and Atari were tried first, could I have simply removed folders, keys and values from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\S-1-5-18\Components without deleting registry entires found elsewhere to achieve the same result? If so, it would make a long process somewhat shorter.
and with that, this noob is signing off for the day.