Victor Chen

Many months after installing Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 on a laptop, I decided I only wanted to program through Visual Studio from my a desktop. I figured uninstalling would be as simple as clicking an icon from the Remove Program feature of Windows Vista. I discovered this to be entirely untrue. When trying to uninstall the main application, I kept getting the following error dialog box stating: “A problem has been encountered while loading the setup components. Canceling setup.” The installation would then cancel (as promised by the message).

I tried many options like trying to uninstall the other Visual Studio 2008 related components and reinstalling Visual Studio 2008 to fix any potential problems, then uninstall. None of these worked!

Finally, I found a link from Microsoft’s MSDN website that contained a free downloadable executable that in one-click uninstalled Visual Studio 2008 from my desktop. It works for Visual Studio 2008 Release Candidate and official release version (English version only). A direct link to this site is at: Uninstalling Visual Studio 2008. The site also contains instructions on which extra Visual Studio 2008 related components to uninstall. Good luck!

-UPDATED- (Thanks to Carrajola)
The link is now here: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/content/content.aspx?ContentID=7276