How to completely remove a corrupt installation of Visual Studio 2010

The other day I logged into my machine and went to open a Visual Studio 2010 project. When Visual Studio 2010 launched I got an error telling me that my installation of Visual Studio 2010 was not fully installed. Very odd I hadn't installed anything and I have run Visual Studio 2010 many times in the last few weeks.

Well needless to say I had to try to uninstall and reinstall Visual Studio 2010. While this may seem simple, it didn't go so well. First, when I tried to uninstall Visual Studio 2010 it would get halfway through and then would say the installer could not complete and had encoutered an error. Next, when I tried to remove SP1, that would also fail. After many attenmpts I finally removed most of it. It was now no longer showing in programs and features.

I then thought everything was fine, so I tried to reinstall Visual Studio 2010. Well this didn't go very well. It would get 1/3 of the way through the installation and it would then give some unknown error and stop.

After some research I came by Visual Studio 2010 Uninstall Utility, this can be downloaded from here:

http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2010uninstall/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=4321
This handy little tool did not only run successfully, but it completely removed and uninstalled Visual Studio 2010 and all it's installed modules.

The Visual Studio 2010 Uninstall Utility can be run in 3 different modes:

Default (VS2010_Uninstall-RTM.ENU.exe)
Uninstalls all top level products of 2010 release and its supporting components. This mode does not remove Visual Studio components shared with previous product releases (e.g. Visual Studio 2008) or system level updates such as Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0.

Full (VS2010_Uninstall-RTM.ENU.exe /full)
Removes Visual Studio 2010 and supporting products, including components shared with previous versions of Visual Studio. Note: may break features of previous versions of Visual Studio installed on the machine. This option does not remove Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 from the machine.

Complete (VS2010_Uninstall-RTM.ENU.exe /full /netfx)
Removes entire set of Visual Studio 2010 and supporting products, including Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 and components shared with previous versions of Visual Studio. Note: may break features of previous versions of Visual Studio or other products taking dependency on Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0.

More information can be found here:

http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2010uninstall