Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Cleaning up an uninstall of Visual Studio 2010

If you uninstall Visual Studio 2010, as it turns out, the uninstall process does not clean up the files from the file system.  If you have numerous installed project templates that you want to retain, that might be a good thing.  However, if you are uninstalling Visual Studio 2010 because of some corruption with the installed project templates or various other issues plaguing your installed Visual Studio instance, you will have to manually remove the files from the file system.


  1. Open Windows Explorer
  2. Navigate to Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0
  3. Right click on the directory and select Open Command Window Here
  4. At the command prompt, type cd.. to move up in the directory structure
  5. Type rmdir "Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0" /s /q
  6. Wait until the directory structure has been completely deleted/removed
  7. Navigate to C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\
  8. Repeat steps 3 and 4 above
  9. Type rmdir "10.0" /s /q
  10. Wait until the directory structure has been completely deleted/removed
  11. Navigate to C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\
  12. Repeat steps 3 and 4 above
  13. Type rmdir "10.0" /s /q
  14. Wait until the directory structure has been completely deleted/removed
  15. Re-install Visual Studio 2010

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