One of my very good friend has problems in running Fraps and he asked me for help. I’ve always heard of Fraps but never knew what is it for. I went to www.fraps.com and found out that Fraps is used for real-time video capture, screen capture and benchmark your FPS. I believe Fraps is mostly being used by gamers who wants to record their game play.
Usually when a software can’t run, I’d advice to try uninstalling the software completely and then reinstall again. Uninstalling completely doesn’t mean just run the uninstall command from Add or Remove Programs. It means to delete every single registry entry and also files that was created by the software and not removed.
Here’s how to uninstall Fraps completely and reinstalling it to fix Fraps not opening problem.
Fraps is a shareware and the restriction is:
1. Fraps watermark along top of video
2. Maximum of 30 seconds per recording
3. Screenshots saved in bitmap (BMP) format
“IF” Fraps has 30 days trial limit, uninstalling completely would be resetting the time limit and that is “cracking“. Since Fraps doesn’t expire, that’s why I am writing this tutorial on how to get Fraps running again.
I used RegMon to see which registry keys is accessed, read and written by Fraps in real time. There is also a similar tool called FileMon but it is used to monitor files being read and written by Fraps. With this 2 free utilities combined, I can 100% know what to delete in order to completely remove Fraps from my friend’s system.
Follow the steps below to uninstall Fraps.
1. Download Regmon, extract and run Regmon.exe
2. Press CTRL+L and type fraps.exe at the Include box. Click Apply then OK button.
3. Run Fraps. You will notice that a lot of registry activities being captured.
4. Press CTRL+F and type CLSID. Try to locate the CLSID at HKCR\CLSID\{Random Data Here} path.
5. Double click the CLSID path at Regmon and your Registry will open. Right click the whole folder and select delete.
6. In Registry, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\LICENSES and delete the LICENSES folder.
7. Go to Start -> Run, and type %temp% and hit OK button. Delete everything in there.
8. Go to Start -> Run, and type del %systemroot%\system32\frapsvid.dll and hit OK button.
9. Open My Computer and navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\ and delete TEMP folder.
10. Uninstall Fraps from Add or Remove Programs.
11. If you’ve purchased a retail version, then install the retail version that you have instead of the demo. Otherwise, download the latest Fraps demo and install.
Fraps should be able to run as normal now.
Note: The above method is not about cracking or hacking Fraps. It’s just that Fraps uninstaller is not smart enough to remove everything that Fraps created. So when you have problems running Fraps, uninstalling and reinstalling Fraps is not enough to fix the problem. You need to manually trace and delete the registry and files created by Fraps.
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