List of all installed applications (XP)?

[Paul McGuire]

Get Tim Golden's wmi module
(http://tgolden.sc.sabren.com/python/wmi.html).  I recently had to help
my brother remove some spyware, and so I used some of the example that
came with WMI to read through the registry to extract startup keys,
services, etc.

Even if your users aren't sophisticated enough to mess with the
registry, rest assured that the software installation programs are.
You should be able to find traces of any installed commercial program
that was released in the past 5 years - I suspect they *all* leave
traces in the registry at this point.  Go to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE and you will get a list of software
vendors, and you can enumerate keys from there.

Good luck!
-- Paul