I have GoOOo on my machine and was having problems with it insisting on loading Outlook when I wanted to email a document. I had the default Windows email client set to Thunderbird and Googled for other solutions to no avail. In the end I decided to uninstall Outlook Express but it wasn't easy. I followed the guide linked below, checked everything was OK, deleted the renamed files, then I searched the registry for all references to Outlook Express and either deleted them or changed the path and file name so it pointed to Thunderbird.
http://www.tweakxp.com/article37318.aspxI thought it might break OOo but amazingly it didn't, it started using Thunderbird instead - brilliant.
Then I thought, perhaps someone should write a script to do this? Surely it's in the spirit of the forum to help people remove unwanted MS applications.
I could write a simple batch file to do this but ideally I'd like it if it could be reversible. An ideal script would backup the relevant registry entries, save them in a directory somewhere, delete them and move all the program files to the same directory which could be compressed to save space. The script could write another script which could be used to reverse the process.
I only saved around 30MB of disk space so it's probably not worth it for space saving but it might help other people who have had the same problem as me.
I've also removed Netmeeting, MSN Messenger and MSN Gaming zone, just as a matter of principle. I used a similar method as the one described above for Outlook.
The Windows file protection is really annoying, I'm tempted to nuke dllcache but I won't because some day I might regret it. One interesting thing is that even now I've removed all the files from the MS Outlook directory and dllcache, Windows still won't allow me to delete it and if I boot in safe mode and remove it, Windows resurrects it, even though it's empty.