search

Nexus-Mods / Vortex

Vortex Development
GNU General Public License v3.0
900 stars 131 forks source link

Uninstall is broken, doesn't clean config (registry), resulting in endless startup errors when reinstalling #13026

Open bbrummer opened 2 years ago

bbrummer commented 2 years ago

The Bug Somewhere along the way Vortex found the Zenimax launcher on my "F:\" drive. That drive is no longer on the system, but the letter is used by a DVD drive now. There appears to be no way whatsoever to actually remove this path from Vortex, so much so that even a full Uninstall doesn't remove this setting causing the attached exception every single time Vortex starts.

So really, there are multiple issues here, but this issue is in relation to "Uninstall" being incomplete. This is a bigger issue because often one of the best workarounds for dealing with software bugs that screw up their configuration is to Uninstall/Reinstall that software to reset the corrupted configuration. That workaround is not possible here.

To Reproduce Steps to reproduce the behavior:

  1. Install the Zenimax Launcher.
  2. Tell Vortex to go find new games, including whatever you installed that launcher for (DragonAge: Origins, etc)
  3. Uninstall the Zenimax Launcher and move the drive letter it was on to a non-harddrive (DVD, CD, etc)
  4. Launch Vortex and watch it choke

Expected behavior Vortex should simply see that the path no longer exists (including if the device letter no longer represents a hard drive) and simply remove the path from its config, effectively it "lost" the game like any other game that got uninstalled.

Screenshots image

Platform (please complete the following information):

Pickysaurus commented 2 years ago

Uninstall works as intended. If you want to purge Vortex's internal data though you'll need to delete the %AppData%\Vortex folder.

TanninOne commented 2 years ago

Deleting %APPDATA%\vortex does not just reset your settings though, it drops all management information Vortex has about mods so you'd lose the ability to remove mods cleanly from inside Vortex for example.

A less drastic step would be open a command line, cd "C:\Program Files\Black Tree Gaming Ltd\Vortex" (or wherever you have installed Vortex if you were using the custom installer) and then urn to run Vortex --del settings.gameMode.discovered. That should reset all info about where Vortex found games previously but nothing else. If you want a more complete reset you can also Vortex --del settings to clear all settings.

I agree that Vortex should allow clearing this specific invalid path in this situation, part of the problem is that we're getting such a non-descriptive error message. The error (I/O Error 21) is all we get from the OS and it's basically a catch-all for all sorts of hardware problems so based on that we have no indication this is fixable on our end.

juanjo-alvarez commented 1 year ago

download the installer, open it with 7zip and extact the uninstaller, execute it