Microsoft states that “Microsoft Office Starter 2010 uses the Application Virtualization (App-V) technology”, and that it “therefore requires the creation of a Virtual Drive”.

Microsoft also notes that “this virtual drive is intentionally not accessible by end users in order to prevent accidental damage to Microsoft Office Starter’s file structure”.

While that is all fine and good, users who uninstall Office Starter will notice that the virtual drive created during installation remains on the system. And that’s a issue. It took some fiddling around to find the reason for this. Microsoft Office Click-to-Run 2010 gets installed alongside Microsoft Office Starter 2010. This is the program responsible for the creation of the virtual drive on the operating system.

It is not really clear why it is not uninstalled when Office Starter is uninstalled. Could be that Microsoft is utilizing the technology for other products as well, so that an uninstallation could prevent those programs from starting up properly.

If you are certain that no other programs depend on the Click and Run application, you can uninstall it separately. Open the Windows Control Panel and search for the Programs and Features applet.

Locate Microsoft Office Click-to-Run 2010 (or another version depending on the Office Starter version installed) and select to uninstall it.

A restart of the computer is required to complete the removal of Office Click-to-Run and the virtual drive that it has created on the system.

WinArchiver Virtual Drive is a free software for Windows that supports a wide variety of archive and image formats. Among the most popular formats are rar, zip, 7z, iso, bin, mdf, img, nrg, tar, gz and dozens of other archiving and disk image formats.

The software can install multiple virtual drives (up to 23!) in Windows which can then be used to mount the disk images or archives.

Each drive is listed with its own drive letter in Windows Explorer. Archives and disk images are mounted with a click on the application’s system tray icon and selecting the Mount Image to drive letter option.

This opens a file browser to select the archive or disk image format from the hard drive. Virtual drives are unmounted the very same way. WinArchiver Virtual Drive can autostart with Windows, and automount archives as well which is handy for mounting images or archives that are needed regularly.

The program is on most regards very similar to the popular alternative Daemon Tools Lite, but there are a few exceptions. Virtual Drive supports more formats than Daemon Tools, and it can create more than four virtual drives.

WinArchiver Virtual Drive is available for download at the developer website. It is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system.

Total Mounter comes with support for many disk image formats including iso, bin, b5i, mdf, cdi, nrg, ccd, sub, img and raw. Even better is the fact that the program does not have to be running after mounting a disk image which will obviously reduce its memory footprint and resource usage. Up to eight drives can be emulated by the software program. Images can be mounted in the application’s interface. One interesting aspect of Total Mounter is the ability to create virtual CD-RW and DVD-RW drives that can be used to write date to a virtual CD or DVD drive.

Another interesting feature provided by the software is the virtual disk creation option. This makes it possible to create and mount virtual disks from within the application. TotalMounter will install a new driver to the computer system during installation to offer the functionality.It also offers the following niche features that might be interesting to some users:

• Provides a iSCSI Initiator for mount iStorage Server and other iSCSI Target.
• Provides a INetDisk client for mount INetDisk Server.
• Provides a network-bridged method. It exports an existing partition, disk, CD/DVD-ROM to clients as a virtual iSCSI drive.

The program is easy to use and does support most image formats that are popular these days.