To make room for Visual Studio 2005, I wanted to uninstall Visual Studio 2003, only to find out that the setup program couldn’t continue because it was “unable determine the order of installation.” Lucky me, I get to waste the next couple of hours manually uninstalling Visual Studio 2003.

Microsoft’s Knowledge Base Article 824642 does a good job of explaining the steps you need to follow to remove your old copy of Visual studio. It references the utility MSIZap.exe, which is supposed to be part of the Windows Installer SDK, however, it neglects to mention that MSIZAP.exe is now available as the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility.

Grab MSIZAP.exe and follow the steps provided in the KB article.

Happy uninstalling.

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