In the almost ten years that I have been in the Information Technology industry, I had never had any trouble uninstalling an application from a Windows computer using the Add/Remove Programs Control Panel applet – at least until now — and I have used the following method twice in the past few weeks.

When you are unable to uninstall an application using the GUI provided by Windows, you can easily uninstall it using the Windows Management Instrumentation command-line interface (WMIC). This works on all current versions of Windows.

Open a command prompt and type WMIC and press [Enter]. The new prompt will now look like this:

wmic:root \cli>

At the new prompt, type the following command and press [Enter]:

product get name

This command will return a list of installed applications. At the prompt, type the following command and press [Enter], where application name is the name of the program you want to uninstall, entered exactly as it is displayed in the list returned by the previous command.

product where name=”application name” call uninstall

You will then be prompted to confirm that you want to uninstall the application. Type y at the prompt and then press [Enter]. The application will be uninstall without further user intervention.