AutoCAD 2012 – Autodesk adds an uninstallation analgesic

One of the more painful aspects of dealing with installations of recent releases of AutoCAD and related products is that although you might run a single setup routine to install what you think is a single application, the end result is a mass of different components being installed. Each of these components is considered a separate program by Windows, and needs uninstalling separately. Frankly, this is manifestly antisocial behaviour.

I have complained to Autodesk about this ever since it started happening, but the number of sub-installations has been getting greater rather than smaller. Now Autodesk has provided an uninstallation tool, which you can find here. If you download and run psebuninstalltool.exe, you will be provided with a list of applications to uninstall.

This is a move in the right direction, but it’s still far from ideal. You still have to choose which applications to install and which to leave alone because they’re in use by some other application, and because of the possible complexities you’re not likely to know. Get it wrong and you can break other applications in a way that’s not immediately obvious. Also, it uninstalls English language products only and is provided “as-is” as an unsupported tool.

This is a welcome kludge to help with a problem that shouldn’t exist. Users simply shouldn’t have to deal with this nonsense. If you install one application, you should be able to just uninstall one application and it should be gone, without breaking anything else. Autodesk, thanks for this interim assistance, but I look forward to the problem being removed in future releases, rather than partially patched over.