i summon one kim

I use Secunia PSI to keep software updated, and generally it works great. Sometimes, however, its detections can turn into a bit of detective work. Most recently it kept complaining about MSXML 4 on all Windows 7 systems. Secunia’s stance¹ was that MSXML 4 should not even exist on Windows 7 — possibly quite true, but not helpful.

Initially I ignored the DLL in PSI, but when it started appearing on all the systems, I had to start searching for more information. It turns out that support for MSXML 4 expired in April.² As it is no longer receiving any (security or other) updates, it would be best to remove it.

The perfect solution was posted by Alton Blom:

Uninstall commands for MSXML 4.0

You can download Alton’s script also directly from GitHub or from my local copy.

I don’t install a lot of software on my Windows systems, so if MSXML 4 did not come with Windows, it must have come with Microsoft Office, Google Chrome, Picasa, 1Password, or Dropbox.

So far I haven’t noticed any issues from having removed it.