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I did a major cleanup on my Windows lately, removing old software which saw little use. Some of them may or may have not installed their own Visual C++ redistribution. I know removing the redists doesn't seem to make sense, but just in case I still want to remove it, is there a way to check for which program depends on certain redist?

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Windows does not, there is the expectation that applications clean up after themselves. Unfortunatly this is not the typical action for installataions.

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Application cannot clean up i.e. remove the redist without breaking other programs which rely on the redist. Therefore, a dependency tree is needed to check whether it's safe for uninstaller to remove a redist. The question is: does Windows installed-programs manager have it? – syockit Mar 7 '11 at 1:19
@syockit- Windows does not do this as I stated. I recall in XP there used to be warnings about uninstalling items that resided in c:\Program Files\Common Files (may exist in Vista/7 but I don't recall coming across them), but Windows doesn't actually know if its used or not. – edusysadmin Mar 7 '11 at 13:38
Well, I removed the whole .NET 4 framework, which Visual Studio 2010 Express requires, and it didn't prompt me to uninstall Visual Studio. But .NET itself had to be uninstalled in certain steps i.e. I couldn't remove the multi platform targeting before some other .NET parts. So maybe it is there for some programs, but mostly it is not there. – syockit Mar 8 '11 at 8:15
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