Visual Studio Uninstaller Tool

[arunpawar]

If you're developing for windows with Visual Studio then you might known about the condition of your PC after uninstalling it.It leaves about 180+(As per my count) reg entries on system if you uninstall it manually.I'm not saying that this happens with 2008 express alone it happens with all previous editions including express or professional edition.Even VB 6 is more buggy than 2003+ later editions.

If you're Pro-visual studio user & MS fan you might think i'm talking lame.Then please let me know if uninstalling VS is not leaving remainants on system & it's not indirectly forcing users to do clean install them.

No matter how many precautions you take or follow official MSDN approach of uninstalling Visual Studio it makes your system unusable.Many of the official uninstaller don't work correctly.Even if you follow the official approach to uninstall the Visual studio components,the remainants persist.You can't have clean system after uninstalling visual studio.

As per official way of removing Visual Studio:
Microsoft supplied miszap.exe which uninstalles the registry entry and some other installation files,But miszap.exe is available with windows .net SDK which is about 300MB (So no chance for Offliners,Slow internet connection users)
miszap.exe is not allowed to distribute other than SDK so there is very little chance of getting it.

Uninstaller tool (Found on MS-Visual express installer install instruction)provided to uninstall previous versions of Visual Studio is also not worthy to run, cause it s just 400 KB and and is not searching registry or /windows/system32 or respective folder for remainants.

So what we need is miracle?
Yes atleast from microsoft or from some group like sysinternals.The silly & idiot MS needs to understand copying OS & programming Language features from others doesn't make it better,it's just path & run philosophy.If they can build a better & secure OS (As per their Sales quotes)and so why don't they just build a proper uninstaller for Visual studio? 

They need to learn some lessons from Borland,Adobe,Corel & other comapnies which develop applications for windows & have better uninstallers that atlesat work 98%.


Is this how the developers are being treated from Microsoft.Then they shouldn't cry if the developers are moving to apple & linux cause many small things in MS are breaking up & VS uninstaller is the first one which is noticed since so many years.

[mrainey]

it makes your system unusable

What do you mean?

[f0dder]

Humm, I dunno about the stuff it leaves behind, and frankly I don't care that much - sure, one should strive for not leaving crap behind, but even 256 keys of 256 bytes would only be 64kb of data. And if we triple that (mega overkill) to take account for unicode and data structure overhead, we're still below 256kb. Considering that the registry uses binary search to look up keys, this is inconsequential.

I'd like to know what you mean about it makes your system unusable as well, I've installed and uninstalled and reinstalled and installed newer versions of VS from VS6, VS2002, VS2003, VS2005, VS2008, including processor packs, service packs, and whatnot. And I haven't had any problems.

[Crush]

I also installed/deinstalled/reinstalled & upgraded from VS2002/2003/.Net/2005 & next month 2008 and had no remarkable problems with lost freemem/libs or anything else ... to delete some old regkeys by hand was also no big problem to do.

[Lashiec]

If it bothers you, it's simple: grab Total Uninstall (either the last freeware version or the paid one), and monitor the installation. Uninstall as usual and then clean up the rest with it.

Adobe and Corel with good uninstallers? I can assure you that Adobe is as bad as the rest and Corel used to be the same when I used PhotoPaint

[arunpawar]

It makes system unusable as when program crashes for my system,it asks me to debug using Visual studio when any error props up.or sometimes it open VS on its own to debug it.

Fodder your calucaltion is wrong,VS installed many filetypes and CLSID which counts to about 1.9MB.And you think it is easy to ignore it?

Apart from registry keys there is also uninstaller of about 2mb each for every visual language like J# and C# is there in :/windows/syste32/somewhere i forgot.Which is not moving at all.

If VS uninstallers are there Please tell me any uninstaller other than official one.
Cause i tried it and it leaves some remainants on my system,now whenevr i tried to reinstall the VS 2005 it goes in uninstall mode and error flags as VS uninstalled in improper order i asked on MSDN these guys says i uninstalled it in some wrong order means first  MSsql then C# should be the order blah blah.

Please let me know if there is any method to unnstall the Visual studio,or uninstaller or way to delete reg keys,my eyeballs are red while searching thru reg for these files 

[f0dder]

It makes system unusable as when program crashes for my system,it asks me to debug using Visual studio when any error props up.or sometimes it open VS on its own to debug it.

-arunpawar

Umm, why does that make your system unusable? You just hit "no" (or cancel or whatever it is) and get on with what you're doing. And in the case you're running one of your own debug-mode executables, being able to launch up the debugger is very convenient.

But hey, google for "just in time debug" if you want to turn it off.

Fodder your calucaltion is wrong,VS installed many filetypes and CLSID which counts to about 1.9MB.And you think it is easy to ignore it?

-arunpawar

You said you counted 180+, I just increased those figures. But 1.9megabytes, is that a problem? Even on a 32gb disk (which is extremely small by todays standards, but chosen since it's the SSD size that's affordable without selling a kidney) 2 megabytes is a drop in the water.

Apart from registry keys there is also uninstaller of about 2mb each for every visual language like J# and C# is there in :/windows/syste32/somewhere i forgot.Which is not moving at all.

-arunpawar

Really? I searched for %SYSTEMROOT%\*.exe , >= 1500KB. What I found where .net framework compilers (installed with dotNET runtimes afaik, not visual studio), an OpenOffice file, nt*krnl.exe, and helpsvc.exe.

Yes, leaving remnants on uninstall is bad behavior, but it isn't anything near a problem.

[arunpawar]

if i tried to reinstall the setup it goes into the maintenance mode and gives erros it is not letting me install freshly.what do i have to do?

how can i wqipe out remainants and reg keys?i have no int connection so can't sownload any uninstaller or util above 100MB so really have prob with uninstaller.