A lot of times people that are new to Mac OS X asked how they can uninstall/remove/delete programs from the Mac.

The short answer is that you can just drag the application's icon to the trash, then empty the trash. That usually does the trick.

The first part of a longer answer is that when you do this my experience has been that you may still see the application on your system for at least a little while. For example, every time I right-clicked on a file an application named Aatrix Top Pay Canada kept showing up in the "Open With..." list of available applications. After digging through the Applications folder I found that this application came with a demo version of QuickBooks. So I deleted Aatrix, then right-clicked an icon just to test ... and it was still in the "Open With..." list. However, when I right-clicked the same icon 10 minutes later Aatrix was gone. I don't know how this works -- what that delay was about -- but it was gone.

The second part of the longer answer is that some applications are harder to get rid of. If I remember right, BBEdit and TacoHTML took more work to get rid of. I deleted their application icons, but they kept showing up when I right-clicked on files. After reading several postings I dug around through these directories and deleted all references to those two applications:

• /Users/Alvin/Library/Application Support
• /Users/Alvin/Library/Caches
• /Users/Alvin/Library/Documentation
• /Users/Alvin/Library/Preferences

(I should mention that my name is Alvin. Unless your name is Alvin your directory name will be different.)

I also looked in these folders at the system level:

• /Library/Application Support
• /Library/Caches
• /Library/Preferences

It's been a while now since I deleted those, and I don't remember all the details, but I think most of the leftover crud was in /Users/Alvin/Library/Preferences.

I think this is rare, though. Usually all you have to do is delete the application icon. But if that doesn't work there may be other files laying around. As usual, just be really careful when you delete things like this. If you have any question about deleting one of these files don't do it, and find someone near you that can help.

My next mission is to figure out where that "Open With..." list of programs comes from when you right-click a file. I hope to have an answer on that soon.