Adobe Acrobat DC Won’t Uninstall? Brute-Force Clean-Up for Grumpy Engineers

Tired of MSI 1402, 1603, 1903, or the classic “Acrobat is already installed” ghost?

Below is the engineer-approved checklist that actually nukes every last registry key and orphaned DLL so you can reinstall without sacrificing another keyboard to the gods of Windows.

Step 1 – Grab Adobe’s Own Nuke

Adobe quietly ships a CLI tool called Creative Cloud Cleaner Tool.
Get it straight from the source (no shady download mirrors):
Adobe Cleaner Tool – Official Download

Run as Administrator → accept EULA → choose 6 (Acrobat & PDF Services) → let it finish → reboot.
This removes ~90 % of the gunk; the rest is manual.

Step 2 – Delete the Left-Over Folders

Open an elevated PowerShell session and paste:

rm -Force -Recurse "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat DC"
rm -Force -Recurse "C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat"
rm -Force -Recurse "$env:ProgramData\Adobe\SLStore"
rm -Force -Recurse "$env:AppData\Adobe\Acrobat"
rm -Force -Recurse "$env:LocalAppData\Adobe\Acrobat"

Ignore “path not found” errors—just means Cleaner already ate it.

Step 3 – Registry Scavenger Hunt

Back up first: reg export HKLM hklm-backup.reg

Then delete every key that matches “Acrobat”, “DC”, or “PDF” in these hives:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Adobe
HKCU\SOFTWARE\Adobe
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Classes\Installer\Products (search for Acrobat GUIDs)
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

Pro-tip: use reg query + findstr to script it if you have dozens of VMs.

Step 4 – Kill the Installer Caches

rd /s /q "%WINDIR%\Installer\$PatchCache$"
msiexec /uninstall {AC76BA86-1033-FFFF-7760-BC15014EA700}   <-- example GUID, change to yours

Check C:\Windows\Installer for orphaned *.msi and *.msp files; MSIFiler helps match them to products.

Step 5 – Reinstall Like a Civilized Human

Download the offline installer (no Creative Cloud wrapper):
Acrobat Enterprise / Classic Track
Right-click → “Run as administrator”
Leave real-time AV off until the progress bar hits 100 %

If setup still barfs, collect the MSI log and ping me in the comments—I'll debug it live.

One-Liner for Ansible / Packer

- name: Nuke Acrobat DC
  win_shell: |
    C:\temp\AdobeCreativeCloudCleanerTool.exe --removeAll=Acrobat
    Remove-Item "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Adobe\Acrobat*" -Recurse -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
  ignore_errors: yes

TL;DR Keywords for Future Desperate Googlers

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