Uninstall errors

I am testing an application and was unable to uninstall. I was getting these errors:

1. Error 1001. The savedState dictionary contains inconsistent data and might have been corrupted.
2. Error 1001. An exception occurred while uninstalling. This exception will be ignored and the uninstall will continue. However, the application might not be fully uninstalled after the uninstall is complete. --> The specified service does not exist as an installed service

Kind of a long and boring story, but writing it down for future reference. I test the msi's on a Virtual Machine with SQL Server and IIS installed and undo disks enabled, so I can roll back after installing software.

The other day I made copies of this Virtual PC and installed 3 different versions of the software. Later on I found out I could not start more than one of the Virtual PCs at the same time because they all used the same machine name and MAC address.

So then I renamed the computer, reassigned the MAC address, and renamed the SQL server in 3 of the Virtual PCs. Now I have 4 Virtual PC's: one with the OS, SQL Server, and IIS and 3 more with different versions of the application.

The application would not uninstall on one of the renamed machines, so first I thought it was storing the PC name someplace in the registry. But then I remembered I tried running Repair from Add/Remove Programs before I tried uninstalling. So I tried to reproduce the error on the Virtual PC that was not renamed. It was Repair that caused Error 1001 on uninstall.

So it's best to remember exactly what you did, then verify the error can be reproduced. I really thought that bug had something to do with changing the machine name.