This site comes up first for silent installs, but has good information for some non-msi silent installs – http://unattended.sourceforge.net/installers.php

I wrote this up for appdeploy back in March 2007, but reproduce it here:

Installing Google Earth Pro 4 in a corporate environment using SMS using a per-machine based installation.

This solution consists of 5 main steps:

1. Do an installation of Google Earth, including the registration information. This puts down a bunch of files into C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Google\GoogleEarth. As well as a whole lotta reg keys under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google.

2. Put these files into a safe location. Export the registry keys into a .reg file.

3. I created an msi to dump these files and the .reg file into the Program Files>Google Earth directory. I also created an Active Setup key to run a script when the user next logs in to the machine. It’s located at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components\GoogleEarth and
I created ComponentID, StubPath and Version. There are better places to read up on Active Setup…
The last thing I put into the msi was the vbscript referred to in the StubPath key.

4. This script which will be on the local machine and run as the user should create C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Google\GoogleEarth where you replace USERNAME with the correct user. Then there are 4 reg keys that contain this path. I created them in vbscript as follows:

Const HKEY_CURRENT_USER = &H80000001
strComputer = "."
Set oReg=GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\default:StdRegProv")

' Create the two keys if they don't exist
strKeyPath = "Software\Google\CommonSettings"
oReg.CreateKey HKEY_CURRENT_USER,strKeyPath
strKeyPath = "Software\Google\Google Earth Pro"
oReg.CreateKey HKEY_CURRENT_USER,strKeyPath

' All keys have the same strValue
strValue = "C:\Documents and Settings\" & strUser & "\Application Data\Google\GoogleEarth"

strKeyPath = "Software\Google\CommonSettings"
strValueName = "KmlPath"
oReg.SetStringValue HKEY_CURRENT_USER,strKeyPath,strValueName,strValue

' Same strKeyPath from here on
strKeyPath = "Software\Google\Google Earth Pro"
strValueName = "DefaultKMLPath"
oReg.SetStringValue HKEY_CURRENT_USER,strKeyPath,strValueName,strValue

strValueName = "KmlPath"
oReg.SetStringValue HKEY_CURRENT_USER,strKeyPath,strValueName,strValue

strValueName = "CachePath"
oReg.SetStringValue HKEY_CURRENT_USER,strKeyPath,strValueName,strValue

Then, I copy the required user files into their profile..

Const OverWriteFiles = True
objFSO.CopyFolder "C:\Program Files\Google\Google Earth Pro\UserFiles", strDirectory, OverWriteFiles

And then install all the other registry keys into current user. This includes the registration information

strCommand1 = "regedit.exe /s " & Quotes & PWD & "UserFiles\google_current_user.reg" & Quotes
WScript.Echo strCommand1
return = objShell.Run (strCommand1,0,True)

5. To get all this to run through SMS, I wrote a vbscript which performs the install with .iss file
“GoogleEarthWinProSetup.exe /s /SMS /f1setup.iss /f2c:\google.log”. Of course, do what you have to do to correctly point to the setup and iss files. After that I found that googleearth.exe was running, so I kill that process so that it doesn’t go off and create reg keys. Lastly, I install my msi.

Clear as mud!

I’m aiming here to grow a list of natively supported silent uninstalls for a number of different installation types. The idea is that these methods will remove vendor supplied installations. Where possible, I’ll use information provided in the registry, mainly that you can find under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall.

MSI

Identifiable by: having a ModifyPath or UninstallString something like MsiExec.exe /I{00000409-78E1-11D2-B60F-006097C998E7}

Removable by: msiexec /x{00000409-78E1-11D2-B60F-006097C998E7} /qb

ST6UNST

Identifiable by: having a ModifyPath or UninstallString containing st6unst.exe

Removable by: ensuring the uninstall command contains -f and -q