In Windows 10 or 11, certain applications may remain listed in the Installed apps section of the Settings app even after they have been uninstalled. This usually happens when the software was uninstalled incompletely or incorrectly: the uninstaller removed the program files from disk but failed to clean up all of the application’s registry entries. In this article, we demonstrate how to manually remove unwanted (ghost or stuck) entries for uninstalled software from the list of installed apps in Windows.
In my case, an automation script was used to remove the 7-Zip archiver from a Windows 11 machine, but its entry was still displayed under Settings -> Apps -> Installed apps ( ms-settings:appsfeatures). Note that the generic app icon is displayed instead of the custom 7-Zip icon in the software list. If you attempt to remove the app by clicking Uninstall, Windows displays a message indicating that the program cannot be found.
In such cases, the first step is to try removing the software entry using the classic Programs and Features -> Uninstall or Change a program applet. To open this dialog, run appwiz.cpl
Find the program you want to remove from the list and click Uninstall. Windows will attempt to automatically remove the stale application entry from the system.
If this doesn’t help, you will need to manually remove the application’s entry from the registry. When building the list of installed apps displayed in the Settings app or the Programs and Features applet, Windows reads application entries from several registry keys (listed below). If a program entry is found in the registry, it will be displayed in the list of installed apps, even if its files are no longer present on disk.
When an application is installed on Windows, either the installer itself or the Windows Installer service must create an app uninstall entry under one of the following registry keys:
- For applications installed for all users (system-wide), the registry location depends on whether the application is 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64):
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
- For per-user applications (such apps are installed by users into their own profile and typically do not require administrator privileges):
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Wow6432node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
Your task is to find the application’s registry entry in one of the locations listed above. Every installed application has a corresponding subkey, identified either by a long GUID (for applications installed using MSI Installer) or by the application’s name. Open the subkeys one by one and look for the entry where the DisplayName value, shown in the right-hand pane of Registry Editor, matches the name of the application you want to remove. Once you have found the correct entry, delete the entire application subkey from the Uninstall registry key.
As a result, the program entry will be removed from the list of installed programs.
In this article, we covered how to manually remove a stale entry for a non-existent application from the list of installed programs displayed in the Settings app and the Control Panel in Windows 11.
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