I recently found myself billing at two different clients, each of whom use different versions of Documentum. I used VMWare to create a development environment for one client and used my laptop as the dev environment for the other.

When I created the VMWare image, rather than starting with a fresh, clean Windows image, I started with my “Documentum 5.3 Clients” image. I uninstalled everything, cleaned out the registry, deleted all directories, and re-booted.

All of the 5.2.5 software installed cleanly except for Documentum Application Builder. It was still seeing traces of the 5.3 components. I double-checked the registry and the file system and re-booted again but it still had the problem. Puzzling.

Luckily, support clued me in to the “vpd.properties” file. This file lives in the Windows or winnt directory and keeps track of the installed Documentum components. After uninstalling 5.3, you have to delete the lines that start with:

e2d8fde61467a0c5ba79004516db8af4|5|3|113

Yours may vary depending on the specific build you are running. In this case, I was running 5.3 build 113.