We just had a customer who was missing programs from add/remove programs. The customer had wanted to remove a particular anti-virus programme but couldn’t find the programme listed under the “Add or Remove programmes” tool in Control Panel. For some reason the entry had been removed.
There was also no uninstaller for the Programme listed under the Programme’s entry in the Start/Programs list, or in the Programme’s folder in Windows Explorer.
This was an interesting situation as the programme was running on the computer and even displayed the programme’s icon in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. This part of the screen which lists programme icons is called the “System Tray”.
The way we managed to fix the issue was to firstly re-install the software and this action then re-added the Programme back in the “Add or Remove programmes” list.