I needed to remove some services the other day and could not recall the name of the tool that allows you to easily add and remove services from Windows. I think it’s srvany.exe, but I have no idea how recently it has been updated, and I couldn’t find it anyway.
So I needed to remove a service and I couldn’t figure it out. Until I stumbled across this piece of sage advice.
Namely, find your way to this registry location:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services
Locate the service you want to get rid of, and delete its key. Done. You may want to stop the service first, since you won’t be able to once it’s gone (and you may not even be able to remove the service until it’s stopped). You might also want to check any filenames used in the key for the service, so that you can also remove the files associated with the service.
Comments
52 responses to “Manually Remove a Windows Service”
Awesome – thanks!
I tried this as:
SC delete [DameWare Mini Remote Control] and it did not work. I am trying to remove the dameware service with a batch file.
Here is the error.
OpenService Failed: 1060
It says the service is not installed or doesn’t exist. But it does. I can Stop the service with NET Stop so I believe I am entering the correct service name.
Any advice??
thanks for the help, Stewart. I deleted XAMPP successfully, YAY!!!
If the service shows “stopping”, usually it is hung up. About the only way I’ve found to get around it is to reboot. Sorry.
EXCELLENT.. something i needed badly.
Hi,
I have my windows service registry entry removed, but my service still exists there, in a status of ‘stopping’. Any ideas of how to get this removed from my server.
I tried all different means of removing it from the system, but in vain.
Thank you,
Suman S. Chitemella
I did the SC and the regedit deletion. And it works great for me. Thanks a lot!
This is excellent. Simple, easy yet clearly understandable.
Just tried sc delete, and liked that better than just tearing it out of the registry.
Just be sure you use “sc delete [serviceName]” not the service description.
The services list displays the description, rather than the actual service name, so open the service you want to remove, and find out the actual name.
Excellent! I couldn’t find a better tool