Can I manually delete older version of Windows 10 SDK?

Question

Currently as it stands, I only have Windows 10 SDK 10.0.19041.0 installed, and this is after I uninstalled older versions of Windows 10 SDK.

One can check in the Visual Studio Installer that I really only have Windows 10 SDK 10.0.19041.0 installed

The problem is that as shown above, at C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Lib, I still have older Windows 10 SDK folders available. They use up quite a lot of spaces ( around 1.6 GB++) and I want to free them.

I tried to use Add/Remove Program to Remove the older versions of Windows 10 SDK, and it said "removed error" because those older versions are no longer there.

So can I just delete those unwanted folders in C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Lib, without affecting my ability to develop on VS 2022?

If you are using Visual Studio 2017 or later, you should first run the **Visual Studio Installer** then uncheck the components for the Windows SDKs you don't want. — Chuck Walbourn, Sep 17 '22 at 00:11
@ChuckWalbourn, as you can see from my first screenshot, the components are _already_ unchecked in vs installer — Graviton, Sep 17 '22 at 09:31
If you look inside those directories, what's there? Is it the full SDK or just parts of it? — Chuck Walbourn, Sep 17 '22 at 18:50
@ChuckWalbourn, how can I tell whether it's partial or full? — Graviton, Sep 18 '22 at 06:02

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 22 '22 at 00:33

1

Archive and delete the folders from what you don't need. Just in case it breaks something, you can restore from archive.

If everything works fine for a longer period, delete the archive.

answered Sep 22 '22 at 00:33

mohsyn

186
12

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 17 '22 at 01:28

Try the following:

Restart the computer
Run the tool to allow uninstallation issues, tool.
Try uninstall from control panel.
If it fails, use this to find the product code or any other tool.
Run msiexec on the command prompt under admin to uninstall it

msiexec /X {product code}

Can I manually delete older version of Windows 10 SDK?

2 Answers2