Uninstall Issues with MOSS 2007, WSS Tracing Service Stuck in "Stopping" state

Had a scenario where I needed to uninstall SharePoint 2007 from a server (single MOSS server holding all roles, separate SQL server) as the customers application of SP2 had been unsuccessful so they were getting search service and SSP errors. Also the Search Administration option was not appearing in the SSP (which is part of the Infrastructure updates and should also appear when SP2 is applied). I recreated the SSP and Search Administration appeared but I was still getting lots of Search and SSP errors. In the end I didn’t trust the implementation anymore and decided to reinstall SharePoint cleanly.

Uninstalling SharePoint was unsuccessful as the WSS Tracing service could not be stopped and was stuck in a “Stopping” state. I had no choice but to cancel uninstall and was prompted to reboot the server. Rebooting the server and trying to uninstall again prompted a message saying “Product Installer could not be found..” I could see that the SharePoint services such as WSS Timer, Office SharePoint Search etc were still present in the services console (in a disabled state). So I now had a semi-uninstalled SharePoint server.

There are many articles on how to uninstall SharePoint manually which involve removing registry keys etc but in the end I resolved the uninstall issue by installing MOSS with SP1, it allowed me to do this even though it had not cleanly uninstalled the previous MOSS version on the server. After installing I cancelled the running of the SharePoint Config Wizard and went to add/remove programs and uninstalled the MOSS with SP1 I had just put on. This allowed a clean uninstall of SharePoint. This then allowed me to install MOSS on a "clean" server.