I have external hard drives that are over 10 years old and still work perfectly. I've also had them fail within weeks or a few months or purchase (the last one that died was a Seagate GoFlex 2TB that lasted all of 67 days). The new high-capacity hard drives all seem very reliable so far. Western...
In situations such as that I manually go through the registry and remove all references to the problematic program. This may also be helpful in removing the program installer: https://www.techspot.com/downloads/388-windows-installer-cleanup-utility.html