While I was at my in-law’s house over the weekend I wanted to do some work on the PC I just upgraded.  I’ve been using Live Mesh for quite a while and have been happy with it overall.  When I went to the Live Mesh site I saw a note telling me that Live Mesh was being replaced by Live Sync.  Great, time to migrate…

Tonight I downloaded the installer package for Windows Live to install on my two primary systems.  On both systems I deselected most of the options since I really only wanted Live Writer and Live Sync.  When the installer reached the Live Sync portion it notified me that Live Mesh would be removed.  The install continued without error and Live Sync started without a problem.  I activated remote access for both systems then tried to establish a connection.  That’s where the problems started.

Every time I tried to establish a connection it would fail.  I found nothing in the event logs and disabling the firewall didn’t help either.  After a bit of hunting I ran across a forum post (sorry, I lost the link doing the reboot shuffle) that indicated that Live Mesh might not have actually been uninstalled.  I dug around in Program Files (x86) a bit and sure enough, the Live Mesh folder was still there as were all of its contents.

I uninstalled Live Sync from both systems and reinstalled Live Mesh since there was no longer an uninstall option in the Programs and Features Control Panel.  On one system I had to go so far as to disable UAC to reinstall Live Mesh due to an error stating “Product does not support running under an elevated account”  Once Live Mesh was “reinstalled” I was able to uninstall through the Control Panel.  A sanity check of Program Files (x86) showed that Live Mesh had actually been removed this time.

With Live Mesh finally gone I reinstalled Live Sync on both systems and enabled remote access.  I tried testing the remote desktop connection again and it worked like a charm.  I only have one more system to do this on but the lesson has been learned: remove Live Mesh first!