Uninstall ClickOnce clients

Question

Since ClickOnce installs per profile rather than per computer, is there any way to uninstall a single ClickOnce client application from multiple profiles at the same time?

We have a ClickOnce application that we would like to remove and re-install using a standard MSI, but we don't want to have to log in as each user to do the uninstall.

Assuming there isn't anything baked in, is there a custom tool?

Answer 1

You could manually delete the ClickOnce install for each user. I haven't tried doing this on a large scale, so use at your own risk. However, these steps should get rid of a ClickOnce app.

• 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].