Can’t install IE 10 anymore, after uninstalling IE 11, 10 and 9

Question

For a friend of mine, IE 11 was installed via automatic Windows updates. Unfortunately, the screen reader in use doesn’t support IE 11 (which freezes everytime after starting it), so I wanted to downgrade to IE 10.

I followed these steps:

1. I disabled "Internet Explorer 11" at Control Panel → Programs → Programs and features → Windows Features
2. It asked me to restart, but I canceled
3. I deinstalled "Internet Explorer 11" at Display installed updates
4. I repeated step 1 and 3 for "Internet Explorer 10"
5. This time I restarted

After the restart, I tried to install IE 10 manually. The installation failed (with an error code I can’t recall; may have been 9C59).

Searching for this error code, I read an advice to remove IE 9 also, and to install all updates for IE 8 after that, and then to install IE 10 manually (without installing IE 9 first). But it failed, too.

So now I have IE 8, and installations of both, IE 9 (via Windows Update) and IE 10 (via Windows Update and also via direct download), fail.

How can I install IE 10 again?

Answer 1

You might have the problem that the automatic uninstaller of IE9, IE10 and IE11 did not work correctly and some packages of these browsers are still installed on your system. You can manually uninstall all packages by running as administrator from cmd.exe:

FORFILES /P %WINDIR%\servicing\Packages /M Microsoft-Windows.
-InternetExplorer-*11.*.mum /c “cmd /c echo Uninstalling package @fname && start /w pkgmgr /up:@fname /norestart”

FORFILES /P %WINDIR%\servicing\Packages /M Microsoft-Windows.
-InternetExplorer-*10.*.mum /c “cmd /c echo Uninstalling package @fname && start
/w pkgmgr /up:@fname /norestart”

FORFILES /P %WINDIR%\servicing\Packages /M Microsoft-Windows.
-InternetExplorer-*9.*.mum /c “cmd /c echo Uninstalling package @fname && start
/w pkgmgr /up:@fname /norestart”

See also

• https://superuser.com/a/1199693
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2579295

After doing this your system should be clean and installation of IE10 should work again