Force uninstall of Visual Studio

Asked 20/1, 2015 at 9:24 Answered 8/2, 2017 at 5:23

Solved visual-studio-2015 visual-studio-2013 visual-studio-2017 visual-studio-2019 uninstallation

104

While uninstalling Microsoft Visual Studio Ultimate 2015 Preview, it throws an error quoting "Microsoft Visual Studio Ultimate 2015 Preview has stopped working"

Message Content Include:

A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available.

I googled and found a utility that uninstalls visual studio 2010 here but nothing exists for Visual Studio 2012, 2013 and 2015. My questions are:

Is there any generic utility that uninstalls Visual Studio by Version ?

Or Is there a way to forcefully uninstall visual studio 2012 onward without using the Program and Features menu?

Cupel answered 20/1, 2015 at 9:24 Comment(10)

Have you tried reinstalling before uninstalling? I appreciate that that seems counter intuitive but it often works. – Jepson 20/1, 2015 at 9:31

Yes I did. but the installer did not provide option to repair or modify. – Cupel 20/1, 2015 at 9:38

After further googling I found a way to forcefully uninstall visual studio 2012. support.microsoft.com/kb/2771441/EN-US#Force. Has any one tried it? – Cupel 20/1, 2015 at 9:39

As I told always "Try future software on your own risk or in the testing machine". Uninstall will never work because of Most of Microsoft team are busy in making cool feature. BTW if that's not work factory reset your PC. – Lapland 20/1, 2015 at 10:0

The un/installer is always the very last thing they get stable for every VS beta. Very important that you never install a beta version on a machine that you care about, you should always be prepared to wipe it. A VM is best. A beta cleanup utility isn't usually available until the product ships. – Nide 20/1, 2015 at 11:49

Any message in event viewer? – Whelp 21/1, 2015 at 7:36

So, I'm still getting the same error despite answers below. Running the command vs_ultimate.exe /uninstall /force still instantly brings up an error dialogue that states: "Microsoft Visual Studio Ultimate 2015 CTP has stopped working". I uninstalled it successfully earlier today, but then had to run a system restore to a point yesterday for other reasons, and it appears to have caused the problem. Also tried installing 2015 enterprise so that I could then uninstall it, which now makes the system report I still have VS2015 Enterprise installed (when i don't). – Gibert 24/8, 2015 at 0:49

im adding this a comment, and not an answer, as there nowhere else to rant. in my entire life, i have not seen such a shitty installer as this one. Ive spent the last 2 hours on attempts to repair or uninstall vs 2015, while it either gets stuck, or asks me to download each of the 130~ dlls separatly by repeteivly clicking on "retry". Ive seen some school kids projects installes working better, with less errors and a better use experience than this. Seriously, do they dont give a damn to such a degree, that they dont even put the minimal effort in providing a normal, working, installer?! – Comstock 12/3, 2016 at 14:44

Advice to everyone: never install a Preview version of anything on an official box, instead use a throwaway VM image. A buggy installer / uninstaller is only one of the many problems you can run into with a Preview version. – Docia 6/1, 2017 at 16:48

It's true. I had a similar painful learning experience with an RTM version of SQL Server many years ago. I even went as far as writing a program to try to aggressively find and delete what looked like offending registry entries. It didn't end well. I eventually admitted defeat and reinstalled. Now I know. :) – Plenary 18/6, 2018 at 19:15

130

I was running in to the same issue, but have just managed a full uninstall by means of trusty old CMD:

D:\vs_ultimate.exe /uninstall /force

Where D: is the location of your installation media (mounted iso, etc).

You could also pass /passive (no user input required - just progress displayed) or /quiet to the above command line.

EDIT: Adding link below to MSDN article mentioning that this forcibly removes ALL installed components.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/heaths/archive/2015/07/17/removing-visual-studio-components-left-behind-after-an-uninstall.aspx

Also, to ensure link rot doesn't invalidate this, adding brief text below from original article.

Starting with Visual Studio 2013, you can forcibly remove almost all components. A few core components – like the .NET Framework and VC runtimes – are left behind because of their ubiquity, though you can remove those separately from Programs and Features if you really want.

Warning: This will remove all components regardless of whether other products require them. This may cause other products to function incorrectly or not function at all.

Asch answered 25/2, 2015 at 23:2 Comment(16)

If you don't have media, doing a dir /s vs_ultimate.exe from the root prompt will find it. Mine was in C:\ProgramData\Package Cache\{[guid]}. Once I navigated there and ran vs_ultimate.exe with the /uninstall and /force flags, the uninstaller ran. – Strife 13/3, 2015 at 20:32

@Asch Does this remove every dependency installed by Vs? The Framework, etc..? I'm asking because soon I'll remove my VS 2013 entirely to install Vs 2015, so I would like to remove every feature installed by 2013 (such as some SQL Server 2012 items). Thanks – Pothook 7/5, 2015 at 19:48

btw if you have community install the exe name is vs_community.exe and has same parameters – Amero 20/7, 2015 at 16:35

This worked for all versions of visual studio. I have successfully tried this on VS 2015 and VS 2013. – Cupel 6/8, 2015 at 7:14

For VS 2015 CTP, the uninstaller is "C:\ProgramData\Package Cache\{60e6abde-0696-4d99-aaf5-b2bb46f0d32d}\vs_ultimate.exe" /uninstall. See details at shouldiremoveit.com. – Longlimbed 14/8, 2015 at 5:15

download the 2mb file from microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=48143 use CCleaner (registry tab) to clean up handles of dll files. – Barrettbarrette 13/1, 2016 at 3:14

This method doesn't work for me with VS2015 Professional. Uninstall runs very quickly and says the uninstallation completed successfully, but nothing is actually uninstalled. – Ossify 26/1, 2016 at 17:14

I have very same problem uninstalling windowsPhone SDK 8.0 and also VS2012 .Using mentioned solution didn't work for me. – Alcantara 26/1, 2016 at 20:21

I had a similar problem trying to uninstall VS 2015 from Programs & Features. However, I had success using the vs_enterprise.exe /uninstall command line. Were I you, I would try just the /uninstall option first, then if that doesn't work I would try both /uninstall and /force options. Good luck. – Grajeda 1/6, 2016 at 0:0

I just found out the hard way that this won't remove any files that an upgrade (such as the newly released Upgrade 3 installer) leaves behind if it fails. – Attainder 28/6, 2016 at 0:59

For Visual Studio 2015 Community: C:\ProgramData\Package Cache\/{4f075c79-8ee3-4c85-9408-828736d1f7f3}/vs_community.exe – Angleaangler 4/9, 2016 at 0:0

@YiddishNinja you should post this as one of the answer. I had community version. – Seafowl 13/1, 2017 at 15:45

Works also for VS 2017. Thank you! – Gader 5/3, 2017 at 15:20

Not complete solution, not precise solution, actually not a solution !, although I thought it the one for the 1st time, but NO, use lifetimes' answer in this page instead. – Kory 23/7, 2017 at 8:3

Can anyone who has VS 2019 Community installed side-by-side with older VS version share how this works (when uninstalling the older version)? In my case I have community editions of 2015 and 2019 and want to free up some space by removing just 2015. – Lunatic 17/5, 2020 at 22:37

Hi, I was attempting to force uninstall VS 2013 Community with the /uninstall /force command, but it just says the device is not ready. How do I get past this? – Tims 31/10, 2020 at 20:2

Microsoft started to address the issue in late 2015 by releasing VisualStudioUninstaller.

They abandoned the solution for a while; however work has begun again as of April 2016.

There has finally been an official release for this uninstaller in April 2016 which is described as being "designed to cleanup/scorch all Preview/RC/RTM releases of Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio vNext".

Dehiscence answered 15/10, 2015 at 1:0 Comment(15)

Nice find. Now if I could just get the stupid thing to work! Looks like I'll have to run it through the debugger to see what's going on in there. – Joni 7/12, 2015 at 13:5

This definitely does NOT work with VIsual Studio 2015. I compiled it myself and ran it, and it appears to detect Visual Studio 2012 only. Perhaps they meant to keep it working for 2013, but it's definitely not working in VS 2015. – Doran 8/1, 2016 at 19:28

@WarrenP I haven't tried it with 2015, the readme by the author reads '..is only capable of removing Visual Studio 2012 and above'. Maybe open an issue on the repo? – Dehiscence 8/1, 2016 at 19:31

This tools really recently open sourced on github (less than 4 months ago) so maybe it's really just at 0.0001 status and not ready to be used yet. Looking at it, there aren't many commits yet. – Doran 8/1, 2016 at 19:43

@WarrenP What's strange is that if you check the 'updated their reply' link, the status has moved back from 'Completed' to 'Under Review'. Would be nice if they'd reply to the issues and at least let people know what's going on – Dehiscence 8/1, 2016 at 19:46

I pinged bheath on his blog to see if he has any comment/update on the status of this github repo. – Doran 8/1, 2016 at 19:55

how long does it takes to uninstall? I ran it and after 10 minutes also it just says Uninstalling .... on the command prompt ! – Subsoil 9/5, 2016 at 5:14

Same for me with VS2015 professional edition with success (using release 5), thanks. The only method which worked for me. – Toxinantitoxin 14/8, 2016 at 16:9

how long does it take to run? Mine seems to be frozen, but I'm not sure – Unsuccessful 19/12, 2016 at 23:57

Can anyone who was successful in uninstalling VS2015 using this tool report back on how long it took? Mine seems to be stuck in the cmd prompt and not doing anything. – Neu 8/2, 2017 at 11:48

Worked for meas well. Thanks. It took a good 5 minutes before anything happens btw. – Macula 5/11, 2017 at 19:46

Took nearly 10 mins before any log could further appear after the initial uninstalling log. – Serin 22/6, 2018 at 19:59

For me this tool found 287 things to uninstall, which makes me wonder if it's a bit too liberal in what it considers part of VS2015, or it might be grabbing other things as well (I have 2010, 2015 and 2017 installed). I made a checkpoint at the start so we'll see if it screws everything up... – Konstance 8/3, 2019 at 13:39

Well it definitely seems like it's uninstalling things that it shouldn't, with 200 MSIs still to go. SQL Server 2016, MSVC 2017 runtime, TypeScript and other stuff; related to dev/VS15 but I don't think isolated to it. Will wait and see anyway. – Konstance 8/3, 2019 at 14:10

@Konstance can you share how the uninstall went? Did it affect other apps like SQL Server, Management Studio, VS Code, etc. – Lunatic 17/5, 2020 at 22:38

If you don't have media, doing a dir /s vs_ultimate.exe from the root prompt will find it. Mine was in C:\ProgramData\Package Cache\{[guid]}. Once I navigated there and ran vs_ultimate.exe with the /uninstall and /force flags, the uninstaller ran

I opened the program "Command Prompt" with as administrator and search run "dir /s vs_ultimate.exe" in ProgramData folder and find path to vs_ultimate.exe file.

Then I changed my working directory to that path and ran vs_ultimate.exe /uninstall /force.

Finally its done.

Aliform answered 27/5, 2015 at 16:24 Comment(3)

btw if you have community install the exe name is vs_community.exe and has same parameters – Amero 20/7, 2015 at 16:34

When I run dir /s from a command prompt running as administrator, it does not find the exe. Gives a bunch of empty directories under c:\programdata\package cache\{[guid]}. One of my exe's was under C:\Users\{user-name}\AppData\Local\Temp\b0800c07-ed8c-4c60-8b0d-02741ff7ae9f. – Ruthie 10/3, 2016 at 13:6

Yes, this is exactly what I had to do... If I attempted uninstalling any other way, the uninstaller would fail. I'm confirming that this worked for VS Community 2015. – Gingras 24/8, 2016 at 10:19

Microsoft now has this:

https://github.com/Microsoft/VisualStudioUninstaller/releases

I allowed a windows 10 update to go through that completely f****d VS2015 so I am trying this before having to resort to a rebuild. WT*. :-(

https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio-ide/suggestions/3487794-create-a-remove-all-remnants-of-visual-studio-fro

Carolecarolee answered 8/2, 2017 at 5:23 Comment(1)

Just had a very similar problem. The uninstall tool, plus removing the Visual C++ 2017 redistributable and the most recent Visual Studio updates seemed to do the trick. It's probably taken 12hrs of messing around to get this fixed, thanks MS..... – Heavenward 22/2, 2018 at 10:24

So Soumyaansh's Revo Uninstaller Pro fix worked for me :) ( After 2 days of troubleshooting other options {screams internally 😀} ).

I did run into the an issue with his method though, "Could not find a suitable SDK to target" even though I selected to install Visual Studio with custom settings and selected the SDK I wanted to install. You may need to download the Windows 10 Standalone SDK to resolved this, in order to develop UWP apps if you see this same error after reinstalling Visual Studio.

To do this

Uninstall any Windows 10 SDKs that me on the system (the naming schem for them looks like Windows 10 SDK (WINDOWS_VERSION_NUMBER_HERE) -> Windows 10 SDK (14393) etc . . .). If there are no SDKs on your system go to step 2!
All that's left is to download the SDKs you want by Checking out the SDK Archive for all available SDKs and you should be good to go in developing for the UWP!

Delirium answered 23/9, 2016 at 4:18 Comment(0)

This is an odd solution, but it worked for me.

I wanted to uninstall Visual Studio 2015 and do a clean install afterwards, but when I tried to remove it through the Control Panel, it was giving me a generic error.

I fixed it by deleting the Visual Studio 2015 folder in Program Files (x86). After that, the Control Panel uninstall worked fine.

Ciliary answered 6/1, 2017 at 16:17 Comment(1)

This is the one solution that worked for me. Using TotalUninstaller alone just hangs there for hours without starting the deletion. Delete the folder, then run TotalUninstaller and it will remove all the garbage left by VS. – Hersey 29/4, 2019 at 8:47

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