Re: Uninstalling Connector.NET 5.2.x
Well, I finally solved my problem through a whole lot of trial and error and some dogged persistence. For whoever else might have the same problem, I'll describe what I did (leaving out some of the rabbit trails).
Some how, in my mucking around with it, I got it partially uninstalled - it no longer showed up in the list of programs to change or remove, and trying to "Uninstall" from the msi package said "This option is only available for programs that have been installed." (or something like that). But it was still at least partially installed, because the icon for MySQL still showed up in the Visual Studio splash screen.
I then tried to re-install 5.2.2, thinking that might clean up whatever the problem was and I'd be able to uninstall it. It failed after registering the data and web providers in machine.config with an error that said: "Failed to install performance counters (-2147024713)" (which translates to 0x800700B7 if that's any more help to anybody).
So I tried installing 5.2.1 on top of it (didn't really have much hope for that, but I thought it was worth a try). It got the same error.
I then opened a command line and invoked msiexec so I could generate a log file and maybe figure out what was going on. Looking at the log file it generated, I found it was failing when it tried to write some registry keys for the performance counter. So I went into regedit, took out the whole ".NET Data Provider for MySQL" key under System\CurrentControlSet\Services (I think), which is where the performance counter keys were trying to be written. While I was at it, I removed the whole "MySQL AB" tree under Software, and removed all references to the GUID for the component (which I got for the log file), and, where it seemed appropriate, the trees that contained them. Then removed the whole MySQL Connector directory from Program Files.
After doing that, I tried the install of Connector 5.2.2 again, and this time it ran. Then I successfully uninstalled it. I re-installed 5.0 server (which I had uninstalled just to make sure there weren't any weird interactions), and then successfully re-installed 5.2.1.
Now, let's see if it works any better in Visual Studio than 5.2.2 did! (BTW, the whole reason for this exercise is that 5.2.2 was giving me some weird errors when I tried to add some fields to a table and regenerate the TableAdapter on a DB and DataSet that had been created with the 5.2.1 connector. It was giving me a "cannot Parse" error, claiming there was a syntax error near the WHERE clause -- on a statement that had no WHERE clause!)