@EinsteinsGrandson No, you just need some of them since a few are backward compatible. (But no all of them). So they do tend to clustter up your system and they do use a lot of CPU time and disk access after you installed them. The latter can make an old system slow for hours (once again, after installing them and after rebooting).
It would be nice if windows used a nice packaged program system, similar to registered DLL with start, settings, control panel, add and remove software
Then again, the default action with apt-get is to remove only the specified package - you need a different option (autoremove) to remove the dependencies too.
@Bob In XP the dlls had a reference count. Uninstalling a program used to decrease this and you got a popup with "XXXX.dll is no longer in use by any program. Do you want to delete XXXX.dll? This might brake other programs". (Or close to that).
Which rather shows that not all programs properly registered themselves.
My understanding is that MSI installers use a file reference count to keep track of how many 'installers' installed a shared file (say a dll).
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE]\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\SharedDLLs
This way, say 3 products all install the same DLL, the refcount is at 3. When ...
> To do correct code caching, the existing shared DLL reference counting scheme will not suffice because reference counts are easily inflated. Specifically, any application that is reinstalled increases the reference count on a shared DLL even though that DLL already has a reference count belonging to the particular application.
> This is already broken for current reference counting, but it will especially fail for Internet Component Download, in which OCXs are used by multiple pages quite regularly and there is no way of knowing which OCXs need reference counts.
though that was even before SxS
that was ActiveX's way of bypassing the system-wide counters
@EinsteinsGrandson any given update can have a multitude of possible reasons. read the update/error logs. and no, I don't know where they are, but a quick google search will suffice.
My default reaction to windows updates failing is: 1) Look in evenviewer and the windowsupdate log> 2) Reboot 3) Net stop wuauserv, delete the softwaredistribution folder. Net start wuauserv. RUn updates