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Under some circumstances you may get the following error message when trying to uninstall Google Earth:
Error 1402. Could not open key: UNKNOWN\KmlPhotoOverlayCoClass.KmlPhotoOver.1.0\CLSID.
System error 5. Verify that you have sufficient access to that key, or contact your support personnel.
Upgrading to the latest version of Google Earth is also not possible, despite you may get a success message on the installer, you will notice that you are still running the same old version of Google Earth you had on your system before attempting to upgrade to the latest version.
The problem seems to be caused by corrupted registry keys associated to Google Earth Plugin for Internet Explorer, it's possible that it may have been caused by upgrading Internet Explorer version while having Google Earth already installed.
To fix the problem you will need to know the exact path to the file plugin_ax.dll on your Google Earth program folder, however path may change on different systems and different versions. We located it at:
C:\Program Files\Google\Google Earth\plugin\ie\5.2.1.1588\plugin_ax.dll
Once you know the full path for the plugin file on your system you will need to use Start -> Run or Command Line to run this command:
regsvr32 /u "C:\Program Files\Google\Google Earth\plugin\ie\5.2.1.1588\plugin_ax.dll"
(making sure that you use the right path for the plugin_ax.dll on your system)
This will unregister the plugin on your system and you should then be able to uninstall Google Earth properly.