microsoft/PowerToys

Uninstall under old control panel fails

crutkas opened this issue · 7 comments

We've seen multiple reports of 'uninstalling' fails and when we dive in, it is due to when a user does it in the old control panel.

Workaround
Windows 10 Settings -> Apps -> Apps & features

How are people hitting this
This is how people are referencing the old dialog.
image

Possible problem: when uninstalling from the legacy control panel, killing explorer may actually kill the uninstall process.

I ran into this issue. Uninstalling from control panel causes explorer.exe to crash. I didn't even think to try and uninstall from settings app. Who knew that would cause any difference. I can confirm uninstall from settings app worked just fine.

Yeah uninstalling via control panel/uninstall program is a no-go for sure. Do we need data on this? Procmon, etw,etc? Or you guys good?

Form @crazyyzarc in #1644.

Explorer process crashed/restarted, because wrong UninstallString was set. Instead of /l (logging) the parameter /x (Uninstall) must be set.

From @enriogior
Hi @crazyyzarc
thank you for reporting the issue and taking the time to investigate it.
The MsiExec uninstall flags is a capital i and is generated automatically as far as I know.
With that flag, the MsiExec is supposed to show the interactive install dialog, that is different based on the current state (if the product is not installed it shows the install option, if it's installed, it shows the change/repair/uninstall).
I'll look into this to better understand if there is something we can do in the MSI setup project, since we don't explicitly set that argument.
Thank you.

We've seen multiple reports of 'uninstalling' fails and when we dive in, it is due to when a user does it in the old control panel.

This is how people are referencing the old dialog.
image

The way it works from control panel is to select "change" and then in the wizard, select remove everything (or uninstall, i forgot). It worked for me this way. But yes, this needs to be fixed (or in fact, this should move to be "store" app if possible)

Fixed in 0.19.0, please visit https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/releases/ for the latest release

For me, the following command is the only thing that works:

reg delete Computer\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products\585E4A3B7515EA9489AF32D4E2B1DD57 /f

This let the installer pass the Cannot uninstall previous version error when trying to reinstall and have a broken installation.