Windows 10: Trying and Failing to uninstall or repair old versions of Visual Studio (Need help)

My laptop has a bunch of stuff that I installed over time. Stuff that is now out of date and not needed. For example I seem to have Visual Studio Express for the Web - 2012. But it doesn't work and the installer / uninstaller is broken because it can't find some of the necessary files to either repair or remove it. It can't find the files locally or on the web, so the process fails and I can neither fix it or remove it from Add or Remove Programs. I seem to have something from Visual Studio 2015 for Applications, and I may even have stuff from Visual Studio 2010, if having folders for 2010 is any indication.


With Visual Studio 2019 - Community Edition already out, I want to get rid of the old stuff, but I may need to learn how to manually remove stuff because as I said, the programs designed to uninstall this stuff are not working as advertised. Are there tools available to help me remove such applications? I assume there are registry entries that no longer need to be there and binaries that could be removed, etc.


Any help would be much appreciated.


P.S. There is not category listed here from Visual Studio related stuff or the Programs and Features App from Control Panel, which as far as I am concerned is a subset of Windows utilities. I posted it here because I did not see a more appropriate place to post it.


Examples of Error messages from the attempt to uninstall...


Microsoft Web Deploy 3.0

A required certificate is not within its validity period when verifying against the current system clock or the timestamp in the signed file.


Microsoft ASP.NET

The system cannot find the path specified.

:)

 

Repair/uninstall of Visual C++ 2017 x64 14.14.26429.4 not possible

I appreciate your afford to help me.

1. It's the exact version that is bugged. I downloaded it again, just in case. Deleted the old exe manually to avoid confusion. The 14.14. installer exe won't let me repair it, says now a newer version is installed as I have the 14.15 installed too now. If
I use the exe to uninstall the broken 14.14 version it will tell me "uninstall successful" but if I check under installed programs it's still there. I can use the installer only to uninstall again and again. So it's just saying uninstalled but in fact it didn't
do anything even after reboot.

The Unreal Engine installer tries to install 14.14 and it doesn't care that I have 14.15 already. So I need to get right of 14.14 and clean install it.

2. I did the repair process, but since I installed Visual Studio after
the Visual C++ 14.14 was already broken. I only installed it in the hope it would fix Visual C++, which it didn't. Anyways, that step sadly didn't help.

3. This step shows how to uninstall Visual Studio. I tried:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer\resources\app\layout\InstallCleanup.exe -f

And all it did is that Windows doesn't recognize my Visual Studio installation any longer, the files are still in the folder. Visual C++ 14.14. is still installed despite it saying in the help page description to "remove all with Visual Studio associated programs"
if I use it with "-f"...

4. I'll write a bug report there, maybe someone there knows how to finally get 14.14. uninstalled.

 

Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9 now available

Source: Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9 now available | The Visual Studio Blog


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Problem uninstalling Visual Studio 2015

Hi all,

I'm having trouble fully removing Visual Studio 2015 community version. When I attempt to uninstall using windows apps I get error messages after clicking uninstall. I'm unable to open the program, I believe it is uninstalled, but for some reason not fully
removed from my PC. I would like to remove it completely before installing Visual Studio 2017.

I followed the steps given online at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt720585.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

and also used the uninstaller tool there. I ran it and success messages showed up with a couple of exit codes, but nothing has changed. I can still see it installed in my programs etc.

The top showed the following:

Uninstalling: C:\ProgramData\Package Cache\{79b486b9-c5f0-4096-a00c-8351f59587c2}\vs_community.exe

Bundle: Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2015 with Updates has been uninstalled with exit code: -2147205120.

Uninstalling: C:\ProgramData\Package Cache\{7a68448b-9cf2-4049-bd73-5875f1aa7ba2}\vsupdate_KB3022398.exe

Bundle: Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 (KB3022398) has been uninstalled with exit code: 1603.

Normal Visual Studio Uninstall completed.

Strange exit codes I thought, especially after googling.

Any ideas how to get rid of this? If I reinstall Visual Studio will previous versions be removed?

Thanks,

Alex