Who cares. It only guesses. Ask quicken to write their program in a way that conforms to how MS guesses. And prevent you from using it in a way that screws up the guess. Your specific properties come from the start menu MFU list.. But it also guesses what the right item is on the Start Menu as it doesn't know. For size it guesses which folder it the right one in program files. It's all guesses.
In order to get the "Last Used" and "Frequency" values, Add/Remove Programs needs to know the name of the EXE so it can ask the Start menu "Hey, how often did the user run this program, and when was the last time it happened?"
From Raymond Chen
[A typical regentry for A/R Progs]
DisplayName=REG_SZ:"Awesome Program for Windows"
UninstallPath=REG_SZ:"C:\WINDOWS\uninstall.exe -SomeParameters"
So Add/Remove Programs starts guessing. It goes through all the programs on your Start menu and compares their names with the display name of the uninstallable item. It looks for Start menu items which share at least two words with the words in the DisplayName.
For example, if there were a Start menu item called "Pretty Decent Windows Program", this would count as a two-word match ("Windows" and "Program").
It then takes the one with the most matches and decides, "Okay, I guess this is it." Suppose for the sake of illustration that the best match is indeed "Pretty Decent Windows Program.lnk", which is a shortcut to "C:\Program Files\LitWare\Decent Program\Decent.exe". Add/Remove Programs would decide that "Awesome Program for Windows" should get the icon for "Pretty Decent Windows Program.lnk", that the frequency of use and most-recently-used information for "C:\Program Files\LitWare\Decent Program\Decent.exe" will be displayed for "Awesome Program for Windows".
But wait, there's more. There's also the program size. Add/Remove Programs looks in your "Program Files" directory for directories whose names share at least two words in common with the DisplayName. The best match is assumed to be the directory that the program files are installed into. The sizes are added together and reported as the size of "Awesome Program for Windows".
From
http://weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/archive/2004/07/09/178342.aspx
You can set hints. Details here
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d...ry/en-us/msi/setup/uninstall_registry_key.asp
