Can I manually delete older version of Windows 10 SDK?

Question

. 。 Answers to this question are eligible for a +100 reputation bounty. Graviton wants to to this question. 。

Currently as it stands, I only have Windows 10 SDK 10.0.19041.0 installed, and this is after I uninstalled older versions of Windows 10 SDK.

One can check in the Visual Studio Installer that I really only have Windows 10 SDK 10.0.19041.0 installed

The problem is that as shown above, at C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Lib , I still have older Windows 10 SDK folders available. They use up quite a lot of spaces ( around 1.6 GB++) and I want to free them.

I tried to use Add/Remove Program to Remove the older versions of Windows 10 SDK, and it said "removed error" because those older versions are no longer there.

So can I just delete those unwanted folders in C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Lib , without affecting my ability to develop on VS 2022?

Answer 1

Try the following:

1. Restart the computer
2. Run the tool to allow uninstallation issues, tool .
3. Try uninstall from control panel.
4. If it fails, use this to find the product code or any other tool.
5. Run msiexec on the command prompt under admin to uninstall it

msiexec /X {product code}

Answer 2

Archive and delete the folders from what you don't need. Just in case it breaks something, you can restore from archive.

If everything works fine for a longer period, delete the archive.