Cannot uninstall Cisco VPN Client 5.0 on Windows 7

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 1 comments

Published on June 16th 2014 - Listed in Windows Network Rant

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For a VPN connection, I wanted to install a new Cisco AnyConnect Client Software on my Windows 7 machine. As I happened to already have an older version installed (Cisco VPN Client 5.0), I first wanted to uninstall the older client.

Not that easy it turns out. The installed application didn't even appear in the list of "Programs & Features". And in the application folder itself there was no exe or msi file to uninstall the software. Crap.

Interestingly I found an article which explains steps to manually uninstall the software. The registry keys got me curious so I took a look at them.

For Cisco VPN Client 5.0.07.0440 I navigated to the following registry path:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SOFTWARE -> Microsoft -> Windows -> CurrentVersion -> Uninstall -> {5FDC06BF-3D3D-4367-8FFB-4FAFCB61972D}

And there I found an interesting registry key called "UninstallString":

I simply copied the content of this string into a command prompt box (launched as Administrator), inserted the UninstallString value and the automatic uninstall of Cisco VPN Client started:

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Comments (newest first)

Rodrigo from Auckland, NZ wrote on Jun 4th, 2015:

Great, this is what I needed. I was trying to uninstall the previous version using TeamViewer, so I wasn't able to log off the user and user my admin credentials. Thanks for that!

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