Force uninstall of Visual Studio

104
votes

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?

6
visual-studio-2015visual-studio-2013visual-studio-2017visual-studio-2019uninstallation
Have you tried reinstalling before uninstalling? I appreciate that that seems counter intuitive but it often works. – Chris Spittles
Yes I did. but the installer did not provide option to repair or modify. – Arafat
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? – Arafat
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. – Anirudha Gupta
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?! – YavgenyP

6 Answers

130
votes

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.

Good luck!

71
votes

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".

28
votes

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.

11
votes

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

3
votes

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

  1. 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!
  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!
3
votes

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.