Uninstall Assembly from GAC

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mark Irvine
  • Start date Start date
M

Mark Irvine

Hi,

I have been writing a small Hello World app to try installing it into the
GAC. However whenever I try to uninstall it I get an error message:

Assembly 'NihcoMobile' could not be uninstalled because it is required by
other applications.

Not matter how I try to uninstall it (explorer, gacutil), the process still
fails. Can anyone help reslove this issue?

Mark
 
Check out this extensive post that covers this topic:
http://weblogs.asp.net/alanshi/archive/2003/12/10/42690.aspx
Unable to uninstall: assembly is required by one or more applications
Pending references:

SCHEME: <WINDOWS_INSTALLER> ID: <MSI> DESCRIPTION:<Windows Installer>

This message is informing the user that Fusion thinks that Windows Installer
holds a reference count on the assembly, yet this information is clearly
wrong because the assembly was never installed via MSI.

If you encounter this problem, it is very likely that you have run into an
odd MSI registry corruption (at the time of this writing, the cause is
unknown). Without getting into a long-winded explanation of how this
registry corruption eventually results in the error message above, the
common cause of this is a bogus default value set under one (or both) of the
below registry keys:

[HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Installer\Assemblies\Global]

[HKLM\SOFTWARE\Classes\Installer\Assemblies\Global]

If these keys are not empty (e.g. they contain a MSI descriptor value), then
you have hit this situation, and you should be able to fix the problem by
clearing the default value. I can't guarantee that this will always work,
but it has definitely been our experience that this is the most common
source of this problem.

(This tip comes courtesy of our resident MSI expert on the Fusion team,
Roberto Sciore).
 
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