empower removal tool

Our team has developed a clean-up tool that removes empower completely. 

Requirements:

• all Microsoft Office products ( Word, Excel, PowerPoint) need to be closed 

Execution:

1. Download the tool from the linked source at the end of the article. .
2. Extract the archive.
3. The (unzipped) folder contains the file empowerRemovalTool.CLI.exe. This is referred to as the empower Removal Tool.
4. The empower Removal Tool must be run with administrative privileges. Otherwise, it will not run.
5. The empower Removal Tool can only be run when none of the following Microsoft Office applications are running: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook.

If any of these applications is running, the process will fail with an appropriate message and a technical return value of 7.

None of these applications must be running while the empower Removal Tool is executing. Otherwise, the process will be interrupted and fail.

Further notes:

The empower Removal Tool creates console output which can be piped to a file.
Additionally the empower Removal Tool writes a log file for every run with a more verbose (default: Trace) level.

Further the empower Removal Tool returns a return code:
0 = success
7 = Office is still running (see 1. above)
9 = unexpected error

empower removal tool features:

• all versions <= 9.5
• empower charts, slides, docs, sheets and mails will be deleted
• At the beginning the tool checks if Word, Excel or PowerPoint is running. If this is the case, the process will be aborted with the error code 7 ( these products need be closed before you start the tool)
• Autorun entries will be deleted
• RemoteServiceConfig.xml will be deleted
• EAV folder will be deleted
• Tokenstore folder will be deleted
• ProductManifests folder will be deleted
• Registry entries under HKU\.DEFAULT will be removed
• The empower.docs.DefaultTemplateProcesser.exe process will be closed.
• The product-specific start menu entries will be removed.

Technical details:

Removal process:

1. The tool stops any process of empower sync or the live update hub.
2. The tool runs the available uninstaller which are automatically stored during the installation.
   1. When the uninstallation is not possible or fails, all information about the installer and the stored uninstaller will be removed from the registry and the Windows package caches.
   2. The result is that you cannot see empower in as an installed Product anymore (Apps and Features).
3. The tool runs the add-in uninstallation process which removes the integration from Microsoft Office.
   1. When this fails, we remove the add-in registration in office from the registry.
   2. The result is that empower will not loaded anymore or even shown as available add-in in Microsoft Office.
4. The tool deletes all program installations.
   1. For the case Microsoft Office is running or any files are in use by any other instance, the files cannot be deleted, but will be replaced during the installation of a newer version.
5. The tool removes any product specific registry entries in the registry.
6. The tool removes all COM Class registrations for the add-In entry point.
7. The tool removes user specific file based caches, configurations and log-files of empower.
8. All operations are applied on per machine and per user base. To enable the access on the users registry, the registry is mounted during the process of removal.
   1. If an users registry is damaged and cannot be loaded, it is skipped. This has no side effects because a damaged registry will not loaded by the operating system also.

• The tool creates console output which can be piped to a file.
• During the runtime of the tool there is a temporary log-file stored in the executing directory of the tool. 
• The tool returns 0 if there is no unexpected error and returns 9 if an unexpected error occurred.
  Expected and handled errors are:
  • File or directory not found
  • File or directory locked (unable to delete)
  • Registry of user not mountable
  • Registry entry not found

Download:

You can download the empower removal tool here:

Download empower Removal Tool