Windows – How to Uninstall or Repair Visual Studio 2015 When the Package Is Corrupt or Missing

Here is my story:

I at one time installed Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition. I then uninstalled it, but the uninstall went badly somehow.

Weeks or months later, I saw the software lingering in the Programs and Features area where you can modify or uninstall programs.

So, I tried to uninstall it again and could not because the package was missing from the Package Cache folder.

Now, I don’t claim to understand how all this works and why it just hung when I tried to both uninstall and repair it. All I know is that sometimes I would get a dialog box during the uninstall prompting me to browse for the package that apparently was missing.

I did a lot of research and tried a lot of different things. Nothing worked for me. Without that package, I felt doomed…. until I came across this article.

I hope this help someone else as it did for me.

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https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3039361

Follow the section under:

Error during a repair

1) Close Visual Studio.

2) Open an elevated command prompt. To do this, click Start, type cmd in the Start search box, right-click cmd.exe in the results list, and then click Run as administrator.

3) At the command prompt, type the following command, and then press Enter.
cd “C:\ProgramData\Package Cache”

4) To clear the .msi and .cab files from the cache, type the following commands at the command prompt, and press Enter after each command:
Delete /F /S *.msiDelete /F /S *.cab

or

Erase /F /S *.msiDelete /F /S *.cab

5) Try to repair Visual Studio again.

Hope this helps!

James

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