I’m currently doing another deployment of Acrobat Reader, this time with VBScript.  I wrote about using Visual Basic to do that here.

Update 11 DEC 2013:
A clever co-worker also points out that if you have a “acrobat.exe” somewhere in Acrobat Program Files directory, then this means you have a Acrobat Pro installation.

The problem we have with a corporate deployment of Acrobat Reader, was that we need to uninstall various older versions of Acrobat Reader.  Normally to do this, you need to know the uninstall command string, which changes with each Acrobat Reader release.  One of our senior application packagers said

Why don’t just loop though SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall, detect Acrobat Reader in the DisplayName key, then grab the UninstallString.

By jove, what a clever idea.

Doing that in Visual Basic .Net proved me with an afternoon’s programming exercise.  Here is the simplified result:

Dim SoftwareRegistry = RegistryKey.OpenRemoteBaseKey(RegistryHive.LocalMachine, ".")
Dim SoftwareUninstall = SoftwareRegistry.OpenSubKey("SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall", False)
Dim sDisplayName As String = vbEmpty
Dim sReaderUninstallString As String = vbEmpty
Dim sMSIUninstallGUID As String = vbEmpty


For Each item In SoftwareUninstall.GetSubKeyNames
'MessageBox.Show(item)

    Dim SoftwareUninstallItemKey = SoftwareRegistry.OpenSubKey("SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall" + "\" + item, False)

    sDisplayName = SoftwareUninstallItemKey.GetValue("DisplayName")

    If InStr(LCase(sDisplayName), "adobe reader", CompareMethod.Text) Then
sReaderUninstallString = SoftwareUninstallItemKey.GetValue("UninstallString")
If sReaderUninstallString <> "" Then
MessageBox.Show(sMSIUninstallGUID)
End If
End If

    SoftwareUninstallItemKey.Close()
Next

SoftwareUninstall.Close()
SoftwareRegistry.Close()