Command Line Silent Uninstall

Updated: Tuesday, 04 May 2021 at 09:22PM

Author: Eric Vasbinder

Providing a clean and automatable, command line-centric way to uninstall Vista is critical to moving into the cloud or upgrading to a newer version of Vista. Especially when one has potentially hundreds of workstations to update.

To uninstall Vista and associated libraries, we will make use of the msiexec program. However, before using this command to uninstall Vista, we'll need to understand the unique ID number or GUID assigned to the Vista application and the Crystal Runtime library.

Determining GUIDs for Vista and Crystal

To determine the GUID for Vista and Crystal, you need to use PowerShell. PowerShell should be available in most Windows 10 workstations. Here are the steps to use it to find this information:

Click on the search box in the lower left hand corner of the Windows task bar, next to the start button.

2. Type in PowerShell into the box.

3. When Windows PowerShell is displayed, select it to start Powershell.

4. Enter the following command into Powershell and hit enter:

get-wmiobject Win32_Product | Sort-Object -Property Name |Format-Table IdentifyingNumber, Name, LocalPackage -AutoSize

NOTE: This command may take SEVERAL minutes to run depending on the number of applications installed on your workstation and how fast your workstation is.

5. Once the list appears, find the Vista and SAP Crystal Runtime library applications. They should each be listed on a separate line. The ID that is necessary for uninstalling them is located between the curly braces.

6. Copy the entire ID listed, including the curly braces, and save it for the next step.

Note: this ID will be different depending on the version and service pack of Vista that is installed. If each workstation in your environment uses the same version of Vista, which it should since most environments utilize automatic updates, the ID fields should be the same from workstation to workstation within a single customer environment.

Using the GUIDs to Uninstall Vista and Crystal Reports

Using the IDs found in the previous section, you should use the following CLI command to automatically begin the silent uninstall process for each software package. This command can be initiated from most any systems management application including solutions such as Microsoft InTune or Windows login scripts.