Another Possible Fix

[Alex Pennington]

OK, as so many before I have yet another possible fix.
What happens is something gets stuck in the setup that stays after uninstallation. What I have done to resolve this is.
* I use the .msi installer that I installed it with to uninstall it.
* Then just to make sure I run on the command line; sc delete MYSQL (or w/e your service is named)
* I then go and delete the folder it was installed to.
So far this is common practice, but here is the thing I stumbled upon that no one else touched on.
* Finally I delete the C:/Documents and Settings/All Users/Application Data/MySQL folder
* Now when I reinstall all works fine.

I found a early warning that it will fail if you set up a root password then when asking for the root pass again it asks for your current root password. This will likely mean that your install will fail. The install failing is not due to the service not getting created or removed properly but rather a fault in the mysqld daemon. Command line running of the daemon yields a crash every time for me at least. To solve that I simply followed the steps I listed above and it worked.

Now I know this is a less than optimal (hardly possible) solution for those who have existing data since the App Data MySQL folder is the heart of your data (according to the conf file anyways) but since I was doing this on a fresh install I do not know or have the time to research other solutions.

I hope this helps,
--Axpen