Unable to uninstall Exclaimer Mail Utilities

Symptoms

Unable to use the Add/Remove programs to uninstall Exclaimer. Exclaimer uninstall keeps complaining that there are programs using it and to close them, but we don't know what programs can be running.

Cause

Exclaimer is a Microsoft SMTP event application contained in the DLL file Exclaimer.DLL. To complete the uninstallation of the program for upgrade or to remove it from the server, the DLL must not be in use. Any process that is using the Exclaimer DLL will keep this file locked and prevent the uninstall from deleteing it.
Under normal operations, the process INETINFO.EXE holds the Exclaimer DLL.

More Information

This knowledge base article gives the strategy for finding out what process is holding the Exclaimer DLL locked.
Every load & unload of the Exclaimer DLL is written to the application event log with informational messages IDs 6 & 7. To get a list of which processes are holding Exclaimer open, it is necessary to balance the load & unload messages that are recorded in the event log.
To do this, start the Event Log application and sort the application log into date order, now scan down the events looking for the event 6 (load) and event 7 (unload) events. Each time you encounter a 6, record the path of the process that loaded the DLL and each time you get a balancing 7, mark it off.
When you get to the current time in the event log, you will have a list of processes that are currently holding the Exclaimer DLL open and you will need to take one of the following actions.

• Stop the services that these process belong to.
• Terminate the process from the Task manager window.

You might find it easier to reboot your server to get a smaller collection of load/unload events to track.
The most common processes to load the Exclaimer DLL are:

• INETINFO.EXE (This is the normal process that owns Exclaimer)
• MSHTA.EXE (This is typically the control panel application)
• PERFMON.EXE (The performance monitoring tool)
• REGSVC.EXE (Remote registry service - used for remote performance monitoring)
• MSIEXEC.EXE (Windows installer service)

There are also several 3rd party applications which sometimes load the Exclaimer DLL, and these will need to be stopped too.

Still having trouble removing Mail Utilties?

If the above procedure does not help resolve the issue, it is possible to manually unregister the DLL and the reboot the server to relinquish all the hooks that may cause the DLL to become reloaded again. If you wish to attempt this, please follow these steps.

• Open the Exclaimer program file folder (normally C:\Program Files\Exclaimer)
• Run the QAHELPER.EXE program
• Press the uninstall button
• Open a command prompt (CMD.EXE)
• Change directory to the Exclaimer program files folder
• Issue the command REGSVR32 /U EXCLAIMER.DLL
• Re-boot the server
• Uninstall Exclaimer using Add/Remove programs
• Delete the Program Files\Exclaimer directory. If you wish to preserve your settings, please follow our KB article [[How to backup and restore the Mail Utilities settings and configuration]]
• Re-boot the server

If you are going to re-install Exclaimer or install an upgrade, you should do so at this point. After you have installed the program, restore any previous settings back to their original places.