How to Forcibly Remove a Program That Won’t Uninstall in Windows

• Dec 22, 2018
• By Kyle Nichols

There are various reasons why a program can’t be uninstalled in Windows. Maybe it’s because of a virus, or it could be directly connected to the Windows system or the program itself may be dodgy. And incorrect removal operations will bring unwanted consequences, such as:

• Program’s malfunction
• File corruption
• Waste of disk space and memory
• Annoying pop-up errors
• System crashes

So, as you may already know, properly uninstalling a program is commonly important, it is not that difficult to do it though.

If you’re comfortable working with the Windows Registry yourself, you can perform a manual force removal. Pay close attention when working in the system’s database as you do not want to delete essential files by mistake. It goes without prompting that this is pretty advanced stuffy, and if you are not a tech-savvy user, then perhaps you should consider downloading an uninstaller.

To manually delete a program, you can firstly head to the location you installed it. Right-click its icon on the desktop and select Properties to find out. Then just go there and delete the whole folder. Then you need to find its key in the Windows Registry, which contains keys and values; keys are containers that perform a similar function to file folders, and may contain values or more keys. If you’re not sure what you’re going to delete, just do a google search, since things are different to each program.

Is it gone?

After going through all of the above steps, the program is mostly probably removed or at least all of its data is deleted. I also recommend switching to a third-party uninstaller, as they are better at dealing with the uninstall process and cleaning out residual files that the built-in uninstaller of the program always leaves.

If for some reason the stubborn programs still won’t go, let us know in the comments what problems you are getting, and we we may be able to help.