Uninstall Tool fails for same reason as Add/Remove Programs

[TheXenocide]

I was expecting this tool would help to uninstall "stuck" .NET installations that can't be uninstalled via the normal approach (add/remove programs, msi, etc.)

Sadly, it seems this tool is just running the same uninstallation logic as those other approaches or at least it does so to enough of an extent that I am unable to uninstall an old version of .NET 8 that I can't seem to figure out how to get rid of.

The issue appears to be an MSI (dotnet-apphost-pack-8.0.0-win-x64.msi) that is missing from its folder under C:\ProgramData\Package Cache\ but I can't seem to find anywhere that I can get my hands on that MSI so I remembered this tool was supposed to be good at getting rid of broken installations (at least I thought I remembered hearing that), though sadly it seems not to be the case.

Any chance the tool can be improved to function despite whatever caused this scenario? Any way I can fix this issue so I can get rid of these old versions?

Thanks kindly.

[lextm]

I am completely against the idea to change how dotnet-core-uninstall works. Since .NET runtimes/SDKs are installed via MSI, it is reasonable for this tool to detect such MSI packages and uninstall from there and nothing more.

If the MSI engine /cache was corrupted or something like that, that should be analyzed and fixed separately.

And in your case, you would have to download the original installer and extract the MSI packages bundled via WiX Toolset 3.

If the SDK installer doesn't contain this package, you might need to download the runtime installer instead.

BTW, the corrupt cache can often be caused by some 3rd party Windows cleanup tools that actually have no good understanding of Windows internals. So, if you did use such tools, avoid them in the future.