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I did a major cleanup on my Windows lately, removing old software which saw little use. Some of them may or may have not installed their own Visual C++ redistribution. I know removing the redists doesn't seem to make sense, but just in case I still want to remove it, is there a way to check for which program depends on certain redist?
syockit
Posted 2011-03-06T18:54:57.653
Reputation: 703
Application cannot clean up i.e. remove the redist without breaking other programs which rely on the redist. Therefore, a dependency tree is needed to check whether it's safe for uninstaller to remove a redist. The question is: does Windows installed-programs manager have it? – syockit – 2011-03-07T01:19:18.063
@syockit- Windows does not do this as I stated. I recall in XP there used to be warnings about uninstalling items that resided in c:\Program Files\Common Files (may exist in Vista/7 but I don't recall coming across them), but Windows doesn't actually know if its used or not. – edusysadmin – 2011-03-07T13:38:08.410
Well, I removed the whole .NET 4 framework, which Visual Studio 2010 Express requires, and it didn't prompt me to uninstall Visual Studio. But .NET itself had to be uninstalled in certain steps i.e. I couldn't remove the multi platform targeting before some other .NET parts. So maybe it is there for some programs, but mostly it is not there. – syockit – 2011-03-08T08:15:29.843