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#2380 Cannot uninstall MiKTeX 2.9
I have been running MiKTeX 2.9 on Windows 7 Professional with Service Pack 1, 64-bit. Till about a fortnight ago everything ran smoothly. Recently, updating of packages broke. About two days ago, an update process ended with an error report. I am not reproducing the exact message here, because today I decided to uninstall MiKTeX and reinstall it anew. To my surprise an attempt to uninstall through "Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Programs and Features" resulted in an immediate message:
Windows API error 2: The system cannot find the file specified.
I have not even touched the MiKTeX installation since the end of June, when it worked fine. What additional information do I have to supply to resolve the problem?
Thank you
mlszw
OK, I have figured out what happened.
About a year ago I installed MiKTeX 64-bit fresh on a new system. I chose the option to install for just one user, being unaware of the fact that this will not give me direct access to Maintenance with Administrative priviledges and the consequences of this fact.
The point is that one needs to update the MiKTeX system by two different commands:
1. miktex-update_admin.exe
and
2. miktex-update.exe
in the order indicated above.
Throughout the whole year I updated the installation using no 2 only, believing this command updates the whole system.
I do not know what exactly corrupted the system after I updated recently; these must have been some changes introduced by the development team to the MiKTeX internals. Whatever it was, though, enforcing update no 1 "manually" healed the situation immediately.
So, all those who experience the same problem, and there are quite a number of them as the review of the posts on the web shows, should go to:
....\MiKTeX 2.9\miktex\bin\x64\internal
and run
miktex-update_admin.exe.
mlszw