How can I enumerate/list all installed applications in Windows XP?

Question

When I say "installed application", I basically mean any application visible in [Control Panel]->[Add/Remove Programs].

I would prefer to do it in Python, but C or C++ is also fine.

Answer 1

The Microsoft Script Repository has a script for listing all installed software.

import win32com.client
strComputer = "."
objWMIService = win32com.client.Dispatch("WbemScripting.SWbemLocator")
objSWbemServices = objWMIService.ConnectServer(strComputer,"root\cimv2")
colItems = objSWbemServices.ExecQuery("Select * from Win32_Product")
for objItem in colItems:
    print "Caption: ", objItem.Caption
    print "Description: ", objItem.Description
    print "Identifying Number: ", objItem.IdentifyingNumber
    print "Install Date: ", objItem.InstallDate
    print "Install Date 2: ", objItem.InstallDate2
    print "Install Location: ", objItem.InstallLocation
    print "Install State: ", objItem.InstallState
    print "Name: ", objItem.Name
    print "Package Cache: ", objItem.PackageCache
    print "SKU Number: ", objItem.SKUNumber
    print "Vendor: ", objItem.Vendor
    print "Version: ", objItem.Version

Answer 2

If you mean the list of installed applications that is shown in Add\Remove Programs in the control panel, you can find it in the registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

more info about how the registry tree is structured can be found here.

You need to use the winreg API in python to read the values from the registry.