assembly cannont be uninstalled...

[Mark]

I have assemblies in my GAC that are my own assemblies. They have a Ref
counter of 1 and i cannot remove them. And the MSI does not exist on this
machine to uninstall the applicatoin that put the ref counter on these
assemblies. What i would like to know is how to manually de ref and get
these assemblies out of my gac .. please

i have searched the registry for anything close to the name of my app and
nothing. I have searched for the public key token in my reg to find a ref
counter or anything nothing... i can't find where to change the ref counter
to remove these.
why can't i "view" this list of what is useing the ref counter of the
assemblies... so this thing tells me there is a ref but it will not tell me
what it is...

frustrated and brain hurts.....

-mark

 

[Conrad Zhang]

Try "gacutil /lr". It should tell you which references are alive.

 

[Mark]

Yes, it provides me with some interesting output.

gacutil /lr

....-omitted assembly information-....
SCHEME: <WINDOWS_INSTALLER> ID: <MSI> DESCRIPTION: <Windows Installer>

What i have found to temporarily work untill i can de ref the assemblies is
to manually delete some hidden copies of my assemblies from
c:\winnt\assembly\gac\<assemblyname>\<assembly.version.publickeytoken>\*.dll
and then reinstall my assemblies into the GAC. i have tried using the
gacutil /ur but i have not been able to get it to work. i keep getting the
error 4 parameters are required.. yet i do my best to make it look exactly
like the example..... but i don't understand what to use for the filepath
entry...

 

[Conrad Zhang]

You cannot uninstall assemblies with MSI reference count. You have to use
MSI to uninstall it. If the MSI's internal state gets corrupted, good luck!