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Question
Wednesday, April 18, 2007 2:28 AM
Hi I've just uninstalled Visual Studio 2005 pro, and all of the things that go along with it (SQL Server, and .NET all that stuff) but it's left behind files, and I'm afraid that If I reinstall, it's not going to give me a clean slate.
PLUS, I want to reinstall a DIFFERENT Visual Studio Pro.
So I'm really looking to completely get rid of the left overs from VS, including the registry edits it has made.
Does anyone know of any tools to do this? or how I might go about doing it?
All replies (4)
Wednesday, April 18, 2007 10:55 AM âś…Answered
After lots of fluffing about, I managed to reinstall visual studio, which fixed my missing templates...
I tried uninstalling programs through the standard windows add/remove programs, and for the programs which refused to be uninstalled:
I downloaded 2 tools:
msiinv.exe
msicuu2.exe -which then gave me msiZap.exe
I used msiinv.exe to get installed programs(the ones that refused to be uninstalled) product code, and then passed this into msiZap.exe, which helped uninstall the programs.
I'm no expert in these tools, so I'm probably not explaining exactly what happens, but that's what I did.
I then deleted all my visual studio stuff from c:/program files, and went into the registry, and deleted HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0
I don't know exactly if this helped, but I went to install visual studio after a restart, and deleting temporary files ( run => %temp% ), and it installed all good
Wednesday, April 18, 2007 7:47 AM
You will not get your PC in a state like it was before the installation of Visual Studio unless you go back to a previous restore point. There are just so many components that are being installed with Visual Studio that are maybe in the meanwhile also used by other software that you cannot completely rollback. Nevertheless when you uninstall Visual Studio 2005 you should have no issues installing a different edition.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007 8:05 AM
LOL yeah, except that Visual Studio just WILL NOT uninstall - not properly.
I've got the solution to my problem,
I'm just going to re-install windows and reformat my hard-drives
Wednesday, April 18, 2007 8:08 AM
or just try first to go to a previous restore point, if Visual Studio does not uninstall correctly then post exactly what the problems are. There are tools like the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility that removes the product codes from the registry tricking your system in thinking that Visual Studio 2005 is not installed. You could then reinstall Visual Studio 2005 over the exact same location as the previous install and then gracefully uninstall it.