I’ve been struggling a while tryin’ to figure out how to upgrade a beta version of IE on a computer (the 7.0 official release failed to update because it couldn’t uninstall the previous beta version). It seems that normally you need to uninstall IE from the same user account from which it was installed. This was impossible in my case and the uninstall kept failing. Luckily in the end I finally read the release notes and (who would’ve thought?) it was covered there:

Internet Explorer 7 Fails to Uninstall from Specified User Account

If you see an error message saying that you cannot uninstall Internet Explorer 7 from this user account, you can bypass the check by following these steps:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then press ENTER.
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer.
3. Right-click the Internet Explorer key, click New, and then click DWORD value.
4. Type InstalledByUser as the name, and then press ENTER to finish creating the new registry value.
5. Try to uninstall Internet Explorer 7 again.

And it works! Gosh, what would we do without regedit…