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
-UPDATED- (Thanks to John Bremer)
A new download link at http://download.microsoft.com/download/e/9/d/e9d80355-7ab4-45b8-80e8-983a48d5e1bd/msicuu2.exe
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thank u , this is work !!
thx!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yeah, thank you very much!
A very nice programm. Like it very much! thanks…
Thanks I found this blog! Nice reference.
thx a lot!!!
Thanks! I wanted to do a clean uninstall in order to fix a number of problems produced by 3rd party libraries. This was perfect.
Thanks alot this really helps!
Thanks SOOOOOO Much – top bloke!
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU I was going nuts trying to uninstall!
Thanks a lot mate!
i tried to do the normal uninstallation from “Add or Remove Program” wizard and everything was a mess. THANK YOU for this link.
Victor thanks. this post is really a big help :)
thank you wow I needed this
Thanks so much!
thanks a lot!
i m having the same problem and this works!
Than you.
I have had the same problem
Thanks. It was a great help :)
Superb!!!! Thanks a lot
thank you for finding this link. i really need to unistall this.
Thanks dude, this was highly useful.
Thanks!!
This is a very good tool, and its working.
I had a problem with Visual Studios either to repa it or uninstall it and now using this i was able to remove, and install it again.
Thanks a lot…………….!
i could kiss you!
Visaul stuido 2008, update is causing the set up to fail.
Try to remove update for visual studio 2008 by view installed updates. And then try to remove the visual studio 2008.
I have been struggling with this same problem.
Thanks a lot!
bruzz (France)
Thank yoy very very much! Very useful blog
try this
http://blogs.msdn.com/joy/archive/2008/10/21/how-to-remove-visual-studio-2008-manually.aspx
Thanks a ton for your valuable info!
tq
mario
many thanks Victor :)
The link is now here: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/content/content.aspx?ContentID=7276
Thank you and Carrajola. I saw a lot of webs talking about this tool, but was unable to find it until you guys pointed me there.
It is of real help
Worked great, thanks for the post!
Muchas Gracias me Sirvio Bastante.!!!
Try this link, it seems to be discussing that exact message
http://www.squidoo.com/uninstallvisualstudio
Thank you very much !
thx
You are a gentleman and a scholar.
THANK U !!!!! ITS WONDERFUL INVENTION.I LIKE THIS.
the link is not found is there other link where I can get it
the link do not work
The posted links above don’t work now so I hunted around and found the following link on msdn to download the visual tool that uses msizap.exe to let you remove any msi installation. I was able to remove VS 2008 with it.
http://download.microsoft.com/download/e/9/d/e9d80355-7ab4-45b8-80e8-983a48d5e1bd/msicuu2.exe
Awesome, thanks for the updated link John!
I tried this posts to get help on uninstalling visual studio 2008 professional trial version, but I cant find the link, it was no longer available. Do you have the right link to this. Thank you
the link does not work. I need to uninstall VS 2008
Thanks! It seems this is a common problem.