How to uninstall an application when it does not appear in Add/Remove Programs
One of the questions I commonly receive from customers is how to uninstall a product when there is no entry created for that product in the Add/Remove Programs control panel. I get asked this question about a lot of different MSI-based setups and OS hotfixes, particularly from people who are trying to follow the uninstall instructions for beta versions of VS 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0.
For MSI-based products, I typically recommend using the following steps to locate and remove a product that does not appear in Add/Remove Programs:
- Use these steps to download and run the MsiInv tool to create a list of applications that Windows Installer thinks are installed on the computer
- Open the MsiInv output file, locate the product that you are interested in removing and copy the Product Code value to your clipboard. The Product Code will be a GUID with curly braces surrounding it. Make sure to copy the curly braces in addition to the GUID value
- Go to the Start menu, choose Run and type cmd
- From the cmd prompt, run msiexec /x {product_code} using the Product Code value from the MsiInv output and try to uninstall it using the standard MSI uninstall command line
- If the uninstall succeeds, you can stop here
- If the uninstall did not succeed, download the smartmsizap tool (if you are interested, you can read about the behind-the-scenes design for smartmsizap here) and extract it to c:\ on your computer
- From the cmd prompt, run c:\smartmsizap.exe /p {product_code} using the Product Code value from the MsiInv output
This set of steps has resolved nearly all cases I've run into in the past where someone needed to remove a product but could not find an entry in Add/Remove Programs to launch the uninstall process from. If you try these steps and run into problems or have questions, please contact me and I will try to help.
For OS hotfixes, you need to make sure the Show updates checkbox is checked in the top middle of the Add/Remove Programs control panel. If that is checked and the hotfix you want to remove still does not appear in Add/Remove Programs, the hotfix may have been installed on your system with a command line that suppresses the ability to uninstall.
<update date="1/9/2006"> Added more specific information about extracting and running smartmsizap.exe from c:\ because otherwise Windows may not know where to find the exe when running the command from a cmd prompt </update>
<update date="4/1/2009"> Fixed broken link to smartmsizap tool. </update>