Hi Gary. No, you're not at all stupid; it's a great question. But no need to worry–deleting the application (Finale 25) will only remove the application itself and application-related files. Your music notation files will not be touched. You could delete Finale entirely from your machine and your scores would still be there (they just wouldn't have an associated app to open them until you reinstall Finale). The deletion of F25 is optional; I kept it on my machine for now but will likely delete it shortly. 

thank you David!!  I greatly appreciate your help!

If you made any templates or libraries in Finale 25, won't these get deleted? I left the old version and made sure to copy my FAN files, plugins and libraries into the appropriate places for Finale 26. I think I'll take this opportunity to redo my templates, though.

Yes. I copied over my JW plugins (the only thing I really needed). But I kept my Finale folder in Application Support, which is from F25 (the new one with all the elements is titled Finale 26). But I think the installer just deletes F25 and perhaps some of its preferences etc. Not sure as I didn’t delete F25 via the installer. That’s what I was referring to by application-related files. It would be odd, however, for the installer to remove some customized folders from the past, which is why F2014 and F2014.5 folders were still hanging around my SSD...

I do indeed have a number of old folders from previous versions in Application Support. I might just ask MM what exactly gets deleted when we choose that action from the installer. I also wonder which of the old files (like Garritan) get updated.

Removing v25 during a v26 upgrade does not touch the v25 files in your User Roaming Folder (%appdata% file path in Windows). I was able to retrieve some config files for percussion maps from the MakeMusic/Finale folder and copy them to the Finale26 folders to save my custom percussion maps.

Adrian is right. Here's the response from MM about this:

'Since you are using Mac, the only item that actually gets removed is the Finale.app bundle from the Applications folder. All other information is left where it is. Most of the information that you are concerned with is at /Library/MakeMusic/Finale and this location does not get removed. 

After the v26 installation, you will find a new folder called Finale 26 at the /Library/MakeMusic location (you will also find folders for every other Finale version you have installed). This will contain all of the newly installed v26 versions of this info. If there are things that you need to copy from v25 to the new version, you can do so here. 

I hope this helps and you can feel free to update the forum thread with this. It looks like J Adrian has already answered the question for the Windows side too. Also note that on both Mac and Windows, there is a folder called Finale Files that also does not get removed. For both platforms this is located under the User account's Documents folder.'

> it asks if i want to Delete finale 25,<

Yes, it asks and you have a choice. If in the middle of a big project, you might not want to do that. 26 does change some of the shared resources and will affect 25 files if you make further changes.