How to manually uninstall the App-V 4.6 SP1 client

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imageHello everyone, John Behneman here, and in today’s post I wanted to pass along a tip that might come in handy as you prepare for App-V v5. I recently worked with a customer who had multiple corrupt App-V 4.6 SP1 RDS Client installs that were failing to upgrade. When we tried to uninstall the clients that also failed. Fortunately for us, the following procedure allowed us to completely remove the App-V 4.6 SP1 client and then successfully install the current version.

1. After exiting any running App-V packages, remove the App-V related services by running the following commands from an elevated CMD prompt (Run As Administrator):

sc delete sftvsa
sc delete sftlist
sc delete sftplay
sc delete sftfs
sc delete sftvol

Note that sc delete does not remove running services so you may have to issue the sc stop <serviceName> command before running sc delete <serviceName> .

When complete, reboot the client.

2. Remove the App-V files by running rmdir /s on the install directory (usually c:\program files\microsoft application virtualization client).

Note: If you get an "Access is denied" error when trying to delete .dll and/or .exe files, run Task Manager in an Administrator context, select the Services tab, click Name to sort by task name, then for every "sft*" (App-V) service listed, right-click and click "Stop Service". Then try deleting the install directory again. This problem usually only shows up if you didn’t reboot after step #1.

3. Delete the following directories on the client:

  • %public%\documents\softgrid client
  • %appdata%\softgrid client
  • %localappdata%\softgrid client

4. Reboot the client.

This will normally take care of the problem and you should be able to reinstall at this point. However, if you still can’t get your new client installed, check in the Registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet for any SFT* services (e.g. via 'reg query HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services | findstr /i "\sft"'). These should have been removed by step 1 above followed by a reboot, but if they are still there you can remove them manually.

John Behneman | Senior Support Escalation Engineer | Microsoft CTS Management and Security Division

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