Over the course of administering Novell Groupwise for our employees I have been pretty disappointed. Aside from the sluggishness, poor searching capabilities, and horrible installation times I was most drawn back by the terrible file management that left systems in disarray.
When upgrading to Groupwise 8 I ran into several instances of two problems.

• Groupwise 6 or 7 will not uninstall because of a corrupt installation log
• Groupwise 8 address book throws error and the auto-complete for email addresses does not work

The specifics of these problems were pretty inconsistent as they all pointed to different dll files. “Entry point not found” was a common part of the problems. GWLDO132.dll and gwenv1.dll seemed to be problem files and replacing them with known good files did not help. Uninstalling either didn’t help or wasn’t able to uninstall at all. I even tried using deep uninstaller programs like Revo Uninstaller and had no luck.
I was recently able to use one of the affected computers for a few days and was able to spend some quality time finding out how to fix the problem.

The Fix

It seems Groupwise is so notorious for these problems that people have made programs that do a deep uninstall and do whatever they need to do in order to remove Groupwise. There are two that I found. I only used one because it worked perfect for me.

• CleanIt – This is the one that I used.
• GroupWise Client Remover – I didn’t use this tool but it seemed reputable.

What works best is if you uninstall Groupwise and Messenger(If you use it) and then run the clean tool of your choice (or both perhaps). Run the most recent setup program for Groupwise and you should be all set. I found that restarting between these steps was unnecessary.

I hope this helps somebody