DesInstaller will show you files installed by the installer
 

You can use DesInstaller to find what files a pkg installer puts on your computer. It is supposed to remove them for you, but that feature seems to be broken on Panther and Tiger. You can find it here http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/13955 . Some of the paths it gives you are relative to certain install directories, so you may have to do a search to find exactly where your files are, but this method should give you all of them.

You shouldn't need to remove the VPC application itself should you?

It's the software on the virtual machine that appears to have been messed up.

You can remove and create virtual machines without re-installing VPC itself.

Rob.

Well, you'd think so, wouldn't you? The problem was, I needed to be able to use Access. Access is part of the Office 97 suite. First, the Office 97 suite didn't appear in Start:Programs, although I could invoke each app directly from the MS Office folder; then those apps wouldn't work properly (couldn't find a DLL); then Windows XP Pro couldn't even see Access; then the Remove Programs utility couldn't remove Office 97 because it could no longer see any of it. The point is, I needed to use Access and couldn't remove or reinstall, because the Registry apparently was messed up. And, with Windows, once that happens you can either spend inordinate amounts of time trying to troubleshoot it, or you can start over. I chose the latter.

Yes, so creating a new virtual machine should give you a totally fresh Windows installation. There is no need to re-install VPC to achieve this.

The actual VPC application itself shouldn't be affected by something going awry within a virtual machine.

Thanks, I guess if I'd thought about it, I would have realized the two are mutually-exclusive, sort of.

So, as I type this note, my virtual machine is finishing up the (re)install. I though I got rid of everything to do with Virtual PC, but wouldn't you know it, Microsoft put something some place on my HD so that it knew that this is Microsoft Windows XP Pro [2], that is, my second XP Pro install. They don't miss a trick.

For future reference (because you never know, I could run into problems again this time): how would I go about deleting Windows from the virtual machine?

And, perhaps most important: last time, and again this time, I got an error message during install that said something about "virtual switch networking" not installing, but then there was another message shortly thereafter, saying something like I could still connect to the Internet even without virtual switch networking. Is that something I should be concerned about?

Thanks again for your help.

Another report of the freezing problem
 

I am running Windows 2000 in VPC 7.0.2. The Mac is running OS X 10.3.9. VPC freezes the entire machine frequently for several minutes at a time. When this happens, the mouse pointer does not move, the system will not go to sleep and it will not respond to keyboard input. If I wait long enough, usually 2-4 minutes, it always comes back to life. Sometimes it freezes again within seconds, other times within minutes.

Initially I did not know that the machine would come out of its frozen state, so I would power off to get out of it. Now that I know, I'm able to quit VPC, swear at it a little and go about other non-VPC business.

When I had the problem I never thought to wait on it. This may be the same thing I was experiencing. I'm pretty sure that the upgrade to Tiger is what cured it for me.