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How to manually remove an Exchange 2007 that got hosed.

Uninstalling exchange was also unsuccessful because some objects were missing from Active Directory. I also wanted to avoid reinstalling the OS as I have critical software that needs to remain.  So I tried removing exchange manually.

1. Run setup /m:uninstall (From Exchange 2007 Media)
2. Stop and disable all the Exchange 2007 services
3. Use Registry Editor (Start->Run->Regedit) to remove these Exchange related registry keys:
   • HKLMSOFTWAREMicrosoftExchange
   • HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesMSExchange* (all the keys starting with “MSExchange”)
   • HKLMSOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionUninstallMicrosoft Exchange
4. Remove the entire Web Server role (don’t forget to reinstall afterwards as it’s a prerequisite for E2K7!)
5. Remove the Exchange 2007 server from Active Directory. I ended up deleting the entire “Microsoft Exchange” branch from ADSIEdit (Configuration Container > Services > Microsoft Exchange) as my domain only has one server.
6. Use Windows Explorer to delete:
   • C:Program FilesMicrosoftExchange Server
   • C:ExchangeSetupLogs
7. Use Windows Installer CleanUp Utility to remove all the exchange related info from the installer database.
8. Remove the security groups created by Exchange setup from AD

Note: Manually removing Exchange 2007 is not supported by Microsoft! Official guidance for removing Exchange 2007 can be found in this TechNet article.