Uninstalling Visual Studio 2013 with VSUpdate error: Element not found

Heath Stewart

Our first public release of Visual Studio Update for Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 is available. There are, however, a couple of known issues in hopefully uncommon scenarios.

Symptom

If you attempt to uninstall Visual Studio 2013 after VSUpdate has been installed, you may see an error after a while that reads “Element not found.” VS2013 may not be completely uninstalled from your machine.

Workaround

Try uninstalling VS2013 again from Programs and Features. This should completely uninstall all but a few packages (like the .NET Framework and any other packages shared with other bundles) from your machine.

More Information

This is caused by a problem in VS2013 RTM. Even if you install a future VSUpdate, uninstalling RTM while the update is installed will trigger this error. This problem is fixed, however, for future versions as well as in WiX v3.9.

Heath Stewart Principal Software Engineer, Azure SDK

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