Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 Takes forever to install/uninstall

Question

I am installing Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 on windows 7. It got stuck for hours at a step. (I forgot at which step.) I then restarted and continued to install again. It got successfully installed but visual studio was giving weird errors while building the projects. So I ran repair on the installation. It got stuck again while applying "Windows Phone 8.1 SDK". There was no progress even when I left it to run overnight.

Now I am trying to uninstall update 5. But it has again stuck while applying "Windows Phone 8.1 SDK".

Any thoughts? Thanks.

Answer 1

Though I had fast internet, it was taking so long. I stopped the installation and tried again. It completed after few hours.

Answer 2

Had the same problem. After blocking the antivir activity, the speed of uninstalling raised many times. It is still slow, yes, but I see as the progress bar moves. The whole uninstall takes about 40 min.

Another feature I used is not uninstalling from Control Panel, but from command line, with /force key

cd c:\
dir /s vs_community.exe

Thus you find all folders containing vs_community.exe. Choose one from c:\ProgramData. cd to it. Launch

vs_community.exe /force /uninstall

It helps to overcome some possible blocking situations.

If the uninstalling process demands some additional files and their address by a popup message, download them and provide the downloads folder to the uninstall wizard. Sometimes it won't help, but then you can simply ignore it by cancelling the message. After uninstalling you can find these problem pieces of SW by name in the Control Panel and uninstall them separately.

This method helps even if you have several different installations of Visual Studio, with some of them broken.