Windows Photo Gallery was one part of a suite of applications called Windows Essentials that Microsoft put out back in the Windows Vista days. It is a lightweight jpeg-only editor that is surprisingly powerful with a nice, uncluttered and simple interface. I rely on it heavily for touching up my photos before saving them to my hard drive after which they will in all likelihood never be seen again.

Last week I had to nuke and repave my computer following an ill-advised download that made it pretty much unusable. Don't ask!

I have backups, backups of my backups, and although not as up-to-date, off-premise backups of my backed up backups. No data was lost.

When I went to reinstall Windows Photo Gallery, I hit a snag that may well be unresolvable. I have the original download files of every piece of software I have ever used, including the activation keys and passwords, all ordered so that I can find and access any one of them in no more than 15 seconds. When I ran the Windows Photo Gallery installation routine, it got partly through and then stopped with an uninformative error message that with a little research told me that the program could not be installed because as of April 10 of this year Microsoft no longer supported it, and because of that would not allow it to be installed.

Is there any hack (perhaps registry edit?) that will allow me to install this program? I don't care that Microsoft doesn't support it. I never once needed support in the 15 or so years that I ran it, and wouldn't expect to need it in the future.

Can anyone help?

tanstaafl.