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Question Autodesk Desktop App - cant open or uninstall

Joined
Jan 17, 2022
Messages
31 (0.03/day)
Hi there,

The Autodesk Desktop App that monitors all updates associated with Autodesk products has suddenly stopped working. It's no big deal in and of itself, my work apps, Revit, Autocad and 3DS Max are all still working just fine, but it is curious.

The desktop icon for the app has now been replaced with the blank paper icon, and the message i get when i try to open it is "the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable".
I've run SFC and CHKDSK scans, everything on the drive appears to be in working order.

When i try to uninstall the Autodesk Desktop App through windows>settings>apps, Windows tells me that the "removeAdAppMgr.exe" file cant be found anymore.

When i try to uninstall through control panel, it tells me that the app is longer functioning and "may have already been removed" and then asks me if i want to remove it from the program list.

The app and all the associated files still exist on the hard drive, except of course for the above mention file needed to uninstall it

I've tried downloading the app again from the AD website and installing over the old install. It seemingly went though without error, however nothing on the system changed, still getting the same error messages when trying to open or uninstall the program

How can i safely remove the carcass of this app from my computer and then reinstall it?

Thank you in advance
 
Manually delete the folder and shortcut with cmd and reinstall, if you can't do it that way try searching registry for autodesk and deleting results (only if you aren't running any other autodesk software or you'll screw that up too doing this).

Hold shift and restart if running win 10 and you can get to the cmd before windows loads and have complete control.
 
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