How to force remove a clickonce app.

If you are unable to uninstall a clickonce app using Add/Remove programs you can try the steps below.

 

  • Delete the deployed files. On my machine, the path to my ClickOnce deployed files is, %UserProfile%\AppData\Local\Apps\2.0. If you delete everything under this folder, it will delete all ClickOnce applications. Obviously, you'd need to do this for each user profile.

  • Delete the start menu shortcut. Again, this needs to be done for each user profile.

  • Now all that's left is an entry in Add/Remove programs. I think removing this is optional since it doesn't really hurt anything, but to get rid of it you can delete registry entries. Go through the users under HKEY_USERS and delete this key, Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\[random string associated with your app].

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