I need to know how to wipe Google Earth completely off my system before I try reinstalling.

Downloaded GoogleEarthLinux.bin and installed. It ran fine a couple of times. Now it hangs at startup and stops responding. A couple dozen clicks on the close button and it asks if I wish to terminate it.
No idea at all why it's hanging.

As we do not know which distro you're using the only advice we can give use you're package manager top uninstall it .
Or if you use Fedora yum remove GoogleEarth

Did you installed as user or as root?
As user, just delete the directory
and
As root
delete the directoy
and

I'm running Debian 5.00 Lenny

The .BIN is a self installer so I don't know if "Synaptic Package Manager" will show it.

The bin will install in /opt or /home/user/google-earth
depending if you install as user or root.

Don't bother uninstalling and reinstalling, because I know what's wrong. Simply delete the directory located at:

And run Google Earth again. The problem is that the install program for Google Earth offers to run the program at the end of the installation, and if you had launched the installer using "sudo" or "su" without special precautions, you have root authority but for some reason the default directory is set to your (normal user) directory. As a result, running Google Earth at the end of the install causes the user (e.g. normal you) .googleearth directory to have root ownership. The next time you run GoogleEarth, it can't run.

And yes, I had exactly the same problem, and I figured it out as above.

I suppose you could "sudo chown -R (username)" the .googleearth directory, but I prefer removing the directory and giving Google Earth a fresh start.

As I use debian lenny too maybe I could give you some advice about how to install or reinstall google earth on x86-64 machines 'cause on 32 bit systems it's fairly simple. If you want too delete a previous installation of google earth just search for it (configure your search parameters first) and delete every google earth folder you may meet from root console, or install gnome commander and run it as root if you don't know the proper command lines.
On 32 bit systems there are only two steps to install google earth:
supposing u have the right repositories in the root terminal just type>

apt-get install googleearth-package
now go to your desktop from your terminal, using a command something like this cd /home/yourusername/Desktop

now just type make-googleearth-package --force, and the result would be a *.deb package that i suppose you already know how to install.

On 64 bit debian systems before running the make-googleearth- package command, search in synaptic for nspluginwrapper and install it, that should do the trick.

And yeah one more thing, if you want google earth to run smoothly you must have your video card properly installed, with it's 3d acceleration capabilities enabled.