Getting Rid of Dell Bloatware

It is extremely common... arguably the norm... for things to be left behind. Some residue is easy to find, some is hard to find, some is exceptionally hard to find, particularly if you don't have a trace of the installation process or a clean similar system for reference. Removing everything by hand can be a challenge for experienced Windows programmers much less average users. Thus the problem.

There are many launch points, or places where a program can hook into Windows so that it is run at startup and-or in response to a user action possibly long after Windows starts up. Generally speaking the hooks are a) subkeys added under specific registry keys, b) files added to specific directories, and c) lines added to specific config-startup files. The details depend on which version of Windows you are using, but regardless, this person's instructions fail to mention many of them.

Startup folder and, IIRC, the All Users' Startup folder.

You don't want to rename or delete the HKLM-...-Run key. The name-data pairs visible under that key correspond to items which are run when a user logs in. You'd want to identify which pair or pairs are related to the software you don't want run and delete just those.

If you intend to uninstall the software, normally you would perform the uninstall *first* and allow the uninstaller to do most (hopefully all) of the work of removing the startup and-or other hooks. In those cases where a subkey pair points to a file that no longer exists on the computer, the dangling registry key will stand out when running registry-startup cleaners.

Since there are so many locations which can be hooked and such care has to be taken when deleting things by hand, it is good to do some reading on the subject (google for windows startup locations and similar phrases) and then take advantage of a helpfull utility. SysInternals's autoruns is one program that comes to mind. I'm sure there are other reputable ones.