How to fix the WMP54G with uninstall drivers issues and problem

Submitted by Patrick Grote on Tue, 01/02/2007 - 3:30pm.

I had to work on my daughter's PC last night. She has an emachines and uses a Linksys WMP54G for accessing the internet. She had broken off her antenna, so she was getting 50% signal strength instead of the 90% she used to get. For some reason, this was leading to frequent drops in her access.

At Walmart I picked up another Linksys WMP54G. My idea was to power down her machine, remove the old card and put the new one in. They had the same model number, same revision number and appeared to have the same drivers.

When I powered on her machine Windows XP wouldn't recognize the card.

At this point I thought I'd better uninstall her drivers and reinstall them. This is when the problem crept up. I couldn't uninstall the drivers. I used the pointer linksys had in the start menu, I used control panel, I tried it in safe mode and I even removed the card. No luck.

I should mention the error I received was:

InstallShield (R) setup launcher has encountered a problem and needs to close.

Pretty helpful, eh?

Linksys has a live chat process, so I tried that option. The wait wasn't too long. I explained my issue to the person helping me, but he seemed to have ignored everything. He told me to try the control panel add/remove programs option. I tried it. No go.

He then told me that Linksys would have to send me, via email, a registry cleaner. No problem, I thought. He then told me it would take six-eight hours to arrive. Here I thought email was a fast way to send something.

Not wanting to wait, I fired up the Windows registry editor and deleted all the keys that had the word linksys in them. I crossed my fingers, rebooted the PC and it worked. The daughter now gets 90% signal strength again. Well, her PC gets it.