SharePoint uninstall - "the product installation has been corrupted, run setup from original source"

"the product installation has been corrupted, run setup from original source"

See this message before?  I saw this when trying to uninstall SharePoint from the Add/Remove Programs menu.  This happened after someone uninstalled IIS before trying to uninstall SharePoint and then reinstalled IIS.

The suggestion was a good one.  After finding the SharePoint source files we ran the setup.exe, entered the product key and let it run.  A few minutes later we got a more specific error message:

“Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 encountered an error during setup. An installation package for the product Microsoft Search Front End cannot be found. Try installation again using a valid copy of the installation package 'osrchwfe.msi'.”

Well, that’s a much better error message.  Apparently the Microsoft Search Front End component is not happy. Reinstall required. After a quick search through the SharePoint installation source files we find the ‘osrchwfe.msi’ file at \Global\Search\osrchwfe.msi.  Double click to run, and a few seconds later it’s finished.

Run setup.exe again and all goes well. Takes a few minutes.

Select remove from the Add/Remove Programs menu and all goes well. SharePoint is gone.

 

Reboot required.