Issues Deploying Uninstall of Revit AddIn
Autodesk likes to force BIM 360 Design (formerly Collaboration for Revit) with its deployments. There's no option to exclude it. This wouldn't be a big deal since this AddIn is relatively small. However, there are a few annoyances that come along with having this AddIn installed if it's not being used by your organization. I want to mass uninstall it from any computer that doesn't 'need' it.
Using PDQ Deploy, the default uninstall string does not seem to work. When I try it on my test machine (Win 7), it fails with a return code of 259. This then makes the target machine unresponsive to further installs/uninstalls and the Programs and Features will return an error when you try to manually uninstall the AddIn afterward with:
Original cmdline string:
"C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Collaboration for Revit 2018\Setup\Setup.exe" /P {AA384BE4-1807-0010-0000-97E7D7D00B17} /M RCAO /LANG en-US
Searching around, I can't find any additional help with the above method, so I looked towards another. Using wmic, I can get it to uninstall successfully. However, it leaves behind the uninstall key in the registry, so it still shows up in Programs and Features list, as well as the application list for PDQ Inventory.
wmic cmdline:
wmic product where name="Autodesk Collaboration for Revit 2018" call uninstall /nointeractive
Questions:
Does anyone know a way to make the original uninstall work properly? Am I missing something or do I need to contact Autodesk Support and hope they actually help?
Is there a way to get the wmic to remove the uninstall key from the registry?
OR - is there yet another way I'm missing that works better?
Comments
I don't know this add in, but if google gives you no better solution try this:
You know the problem (reg keys), now you have to dig deeper to find the keys and delete them with a cmd step
REG DELETE HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE............\path_to_entry /f
~Chris
Thanks for the suggestion, Chris. I had considered that yesterday but didn't feel like it was a clean solution. I got over that quick!
Diving into the registry, I can see there's just a problem with the uninstall of this addon in general. The GUID key had completely different UninstallString and UninstallPath values from the Product by Name key (shown below). This made me try the original string with various settings from the command line on my test machine. The original uninstall string/path will only pull up the UI uninstaller (as a modification). Once open, there's no keystroke that will advance it. It looks like a physical click is required. I guess this is why the initial test deploy hung up the install/uninstall process.
Lesson learned by me? Don't blindly trust the uninstall string generated from PDQ Deploy. Check the registry first - compare GUID key entries vs Product by Name key entries (especially if there have been version updates - check your versions!). Then manually test at the cmd from the test machine.
In this instance, using wmic and a reg delete worked better than the original command line.