Problem while checking on the user's computer if SharePoint is installed or not

Problem while checking on the user's computer if SharePoint is installed or not
Hi,

For creating a sharepoint deployment I need to check if the SharePoint is installed on the user's machine or not. For this I checked the registry as follows :
--> readRegStr $0 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\14.0" "Version"
--> MessageBox MB_OK $0

As on a machine where I am checking this has SharePoint installed but still the $0 returns blank.

When I tried to check other installations with the same method as above I was getting some value in $0. I searched a lot on the net but couldn't get any other way to do this.
If SharePoint is not installed on the machine then in Shared Tools, Web Server Extensions will not exists.

Am I doing it wrong to check SharePoint installtion? Is there any other way to check this?
Please provide me with some solution.

Thanks & regards,
Mayur Mahajan.