What To Do When You Can’t Uninstall iTunes

iTunes is fine when it works but it relies on a huge suite of programs which can easily become corrupted and stop it working.

What Are The Symptoms Of A Corrupted iTunes?

iTunes doesn’t work and trying to install a new version of it (in the hope that it will overwrite your corrupted version and fix the problem) doesn’t work either – the new installation fails, because you already have iTunes installed…

Trying to uninstall iTunes in the normal way also fails – you may see an error message ‘the feature you are trying to use is on a network resource that is unavailable…’ which relates to a missing file called iTunes.msi

But, even if you copy that file from another computer, it does not fix the problem – the uninstall process still fails…

To sum up – iTunes doesn’t work properly, you can’t install over the top of it and you can’t uninstall iTunes either – you’re seemingly stuck with a corrupted installation :-(

What To Do When You Can’t Uninstall iTunes

If iTunes is corrupt you do need to uninstall it – and all the other Apple programs in the iTunes suite too. After they are all removed successfully you can then download and install the latest version of iTunes and it should install ok.

The programs you will need to uninstall (where present) are, in this order:

1. iTunes
2. QuickTime
3. Apple Software Update
4. Apple Mobile Device Support
5. Bonjour
6. Apple Application Support

Because uninstalling in the normal way does not work, you will need to use a different method.

I recommend using the free Revo Uninstaller utility program as it can forcibly uninstall these Apple programs and remove any leftover or corrupt files – I’ll review how to use it in the next section.

Warning: some websites advise using Windows Installer Cleanup Utility (msicuu2.exe) from Microsoft instead but this utility was abandoned years ago because of the problems it caused. Microsoft said “it sometimes damaged other components installed on the computer. Because of this, the tool has been removed from the Microsoft Download Center”. For this reason I do NOT recommend it.

How To Use Revo to Uninstall iTunes

Download Revo – click the the Portable button under ‘Revo Uninstaller FREEWARE’ on the left of this page to download it as a zip file. Unzip it into a RevoUninstaller_Portable folder.

In that folder, navigate through to and double click on RevoUPORT.exe then accept the license agreement to launch the program – an example screenshot is below:

1. Scroll to find your iTunes icon and click on it to select
2. In the middle of Revo’s menu bar, click the ‘Uninstall’ button
3. When prompted if you want to uninstall the selected program, click ‘Yes’ to confirm
4. The ‘Select An Uninstall Mode’ window appears – choose ‘Moderate’ (click the radio button next to it) then ‘Next’ to continue
5. A system restore point is created first then Revo will try to uninstall the program using the built in uninstaller (i.e. the same as uninstalling normally)
6. In the case of a corrupt program this part will fail, with an error message, but this is to be expected! It fails like it did when you tried uninstalling iTunes manually – but don’t worry, the next part will uninstall it
7. Click ‘OK’ to confirm the error message and wait until the green progress bar has completed (moved to the right hand side) then press the ‘Next’ button
8. Revo now scans for leftover registry entries and files – in the case of iTunes this may take a long time as there may be a lot of them!
9. When the green progress bar has completed press the ‘Next’ button to reveal a long list of ‘Found Leftover Registry Items’
10. Click the ‘Select All’ button (which ticks all entries) then click the ‘Delete’ button to remove them – when prompted to confirm deletion click ‘Yes’ to remove them
11. After they have been removed, click ‘Next’ to check for ‘Found Leftover Files and Folders’
12. Click the ‘Select All’ button (which ticks all entries) then click the ‘Delete’ button to remove them – when prompted to confirm deletion click ‘Yes’ to remove them
13. Click ‘Next’ to continue then click ‘Finish’ to end the uninstall process – the program has now been removed
14. After you have removed iTunes itself, go back to step 1 and repeat this same process for QuickTime and the other 4 Apple programs, if they are installed

After all 6 programs have been removed, restart the computer. Now download and install the latest version of iTunes from Apple here – the installation should now work as normal :-)

Conclusion

iTunes can be a real pain to fix if it gets corrupted and can’t be uninstalled.

Using Revo Uninstaller can be an effective way to forcibly remove all traces of the application’s suite of programs – once they have gone, iTunes can be downloaded and installed in the usual way.