Disabling or Uninstalling IXgen

Many times when upgrading or troubleshooting a problem, we’re told to uninstall/reinstall a product. This is generally not necessary with IXgen. However, should you need to stop using IXgen, here are two different approaches.

Disabling IXgen

You can leave IXgen in place, but stop it from loading when FrameMaker loads. Here’s how: 1. Quit FrameMaker. 2. Use a non-formating, plain text editor, such as Notepad, to open either the maker.ini file or the framemaker.ini file. (Some FrameMaker versions use different names for the FrameMaker initialization file.) This file is located in the top-level folder of your FrameMaker installation. DO NOT USE FRAMEMAKER TO EDIT THIS PLAIN TEXT FILE. DO NOT USE WORDPAD OR ANY OTHER “FORMATTING” EDITOR TO CHANGE THIS FILE. This file must be kept in plain text form. 3. Search for this string: IXgen=Standard,Marker Management,ixgen\bin\ixgen.dll, all This will typically be at or near the end of the API Clients section of the .ini file. 4. Insert a semicolon at the very beginning of the line (circled in red), as shown in this screen capture: 5. Save the modified .ini file and exit Notepad. The semicolon is used as a “comment line” character in an .ini file. In this example, the API registration for IXgen has been “commented out” and IXgen will not load the next time FrameMaker is started. 6. To bring IXgen “back to life”, return to this .ini file and remove the semicolon. Restart FrameMaker. Assuming the rest of the IXgen installation has been left intact, IXgen will again be active.

Permanently Removing IXgen

An executable script, removeix.exe, is provided with the IXgen distribution. First, quit FrameMaker. Next, click on removeix.exe. (You might need to right-click and run the script and run as administrator.) YOU MUST EXECUTE THE COPY OF REMOVEIX.EXE THAT RESIDES IN THE IXGEN FOLDER LOCATED IN THE MAIN FRAMEMAKER INSTALLATION FOLDER. DO NOT EXECUTE REMOVEIX.EXE FROM ANY OTHER LOCATION, SUCH AS THE ORIGINAL DOWNLOAD FOLDER WHERE YOU STORED AND EXTRACTED IXGEN. This script will do the bulk of uninstalling IXgen, but it can’t remove itself. Once the script has completed, you can use Windows explorer to manually remove this script and its host folder.