Monday, August 14, 2017

Removing Icons in Windows 10 1703 after Removing Bloatware with Remove-AppxPackage

We had an issue creating a Windows 10 image at another customer site after upgrading the Image to 1703.  The 1703 update introduced yet more bloatware.

After removing the additional bloatware from our image introduced in Windows 10 1703 with "Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers | Remove-AppxPackage", we had a number of apps which were still in the start menu for all users but could not be removed and were not functional.
  • Adobe Photoshop Express
  • Eclipse Manager
  • MSN News
  • And a few others...
 
In order to remove these apps from the start menu, we first needed to add all the bloatware back with the following command:
 
Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}
 
Once all modern apps were in an active state, we then removed the problematic applications which we could not remove... Adobe Photoshop Express, Eclipse Manager etc.  Once they were removed we then re-ran the "Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers | Remove-AppxPackage" cmdlet.
Now they were gone.  We created a new default profile, cleaned up the image and sysprepped it for deployment.
 
Hope this is helpful to someone else.

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