Uninstalling Microsoft Office 2016

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[Kathy Stevens]

We are having a problem with Outlook 2016 on one of our Windows 10 Pro workstations and are considering removing Microsoft Office 2016 from the machine and then reinstalling it.

Does anyone have experience using the Office Removal Tool?

https://www.gearprimer.com/technology/microsoft-office-removal-tool-completely-uninstall-office/

Does it work?

Is there a better way to remove Microsoft Office 2016 from the PC?

Our objective is to remove all traces of the Office installation.

• This topic was modified 2 years, 12 months ago by Kathy Stevens.

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I never installed Office 2016.  I have MS Office Home and Business 2019, but Event Viewer has been recording Office 16 Alerts for some time now.  I guess it is either part of Office 2019 or part of built in Outlook in Windows 10.  I have no idea what is going on, but your problem could be related.

See this discussion:

https://www.askwoody.com/forums/topic/windows-update-causes-repeating-error-in-office/#post-2443424

HP Pavilion Desktop TP01-0050 – 64 bit
Windows 10 Home Version 22H2
OS build 19045.5608
Windows Defender and Windows Firewall
Microsoft Office Home and Business 2019
-Version 2502(Build 18526.20168 C2R)

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Kathy Stevens

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Hi Kathy Stevens:

My Dell Win 10 Pro laptop shipped in 2019 with a 30-day trial version of MS Office 365 and I downloaded that Office uninstall tool from the MS support article Uninstall Office From a PC (Option 2 – Completely uninstall Office with the uninstall support tool) and ran the tool as instructed to scrub MS Office 365 off my computer before I installed my “perpetual” edition of Microsoft Office Home & Business 2019 C2R. I recall the Office uninstall tool did a decent job of removing MS Office 365, although I can’t remember if I did any further manual scrubbing afterwards (e.g., if I looked for additional orphaned registry entries with the registry cleaner in CCleaner, etc.).
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Dell Inspiron 5584 * 64-bit Win 10 Pro v21H2 build 19044.1645 * MS Office Home and Business 2019 (Version 2204 Build 15128.20178 Click-to-Run) * CCleaner Free Portable v5.92.9652

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Kathy Stevens

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Hi Kathy,

I have used the Office Removal Tool before. First you uninstall Office just like any other program from under Control Panel. After doing that and rebooting, you then run the Office Removal Tool. The Office Removal Tool takes quite a while to run, and at times it might appear that it is not doing anything even though it is. Aside from searching for and removing all remaining traces of your current version of Office, the tool also has to search for all remaining traces of other uninstalled previous versions of Office as well. The latter is what makes the tool take so long. Once the Office Removal Tool has started to remove all traces of Office, perhaps walk away and enjoy a nice cup of coffee.

As to why there are duplicate emails, Outlook on the computer is configured to use IMAP and the user likely is also using their cell phone configured to use IMAP to also check for email. This setup (e.g., two separate devices using IMAP to check email) can cause the duplicate email issues which you reported.

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lmacri, Kathy Stevens

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For security reasons, only one device is interacting with our email service provider.

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After using the Office Removal Tool, CCleaner found absolutely no leftover traces. It truly is as Office had never existed on the computer.

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Kathy Stevens

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Our Outlook 2016 problem is twofold.

1. When we have Outlook 2016 open it does not work properly with our e-mail host. The incoming e-mail stacks up on the host’s server and they are only downloaded when we delete a message from the Inbox, delete a message from Trash, or send a New Email.
2. The problematic Outlook inbox indicates that it is storing 590 messages while the email host’s server indicates that it is storing 591 new unread messages and a total of 2,750 messages. When sorting through the inbox messages on the server it is obvious that there are hundreds of duplicate messages. Each set of duplicate messages are from the same sender, sent at the same time and date, have the same heading, and are the same size.
3. The misbehaving Outlook 2016 app serves to email accounts. Only one of the two is not functioning properly – the primary account.

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mpw wrote:

I never installed Office 2016. I have MS Office Home and Business 2019, but Event Viewer has been recording Office 16 Alerts for some time now…

Hi mpw:

See my post # 2444185 in glnz’s Windows Update Causes Repeating Error in Office?. I’m not certain, but I assume these Event ID 300 “Microsoft Office 16 Alerts” are named that in my Event Viewer because the full build number of my MS Office Home & Business 2019 Version 2204 Build 15128.20178 Click-to-Run (released 26-Apr-2022) that is shown at File | Office Account | About is actually build 16.0.15128.20178 (i.e., not  build 19.0.15128.20178 as one might expect for an Office 2019 product).

———-
Dell Inspiron 5584 * 64-bit Win 10 Pro v21H2 build 19044.1645 * MS Office Home and Business 2019 (Version 2204 Build 15128.20178 Click-to-Run)

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Kathy Stevens

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Kathy Stevens wrote:

Our Outlook 2016 problem is twofold…

Hi Kathy Stevens:

I don’t want to take your thread off-topic, but before you try a clean reinstall with the Office Uninstall Tool you might want to try a repair from Control Panel | Programs | Programs and Features (i.e., highlight your MS Office 2016 program and click Change) if that option is available to you. You can try a Quick Repair first, but a full refresh using the Online Repair option will often solve a hard-to-diagnose problem if your MS Office installation is corrupted.

———-
Dell Inspiron 5584 * 64-bit Win 10 Pro v21H2 build 19044.1645 * MS Office Home and Business 2019 (Version 2204 Build 15128.20178 Click-to-Run)

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Kathy Stevens

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I have already run an “Online Repair” for Microsoft Office 2016 as outlined in your post.  It did not resolve the problem.

The problem may be bigger than Microsoft Outlook.  I have been in touch with our email host and they said, “This sounds similar to a rare problem we are aware of but we don’t know what causes it yet. Once thing you could try is you are using Outlook with IMAP is rather than deleting a message, actually flag one as starred or read/unread instead. My idea is that if your case is the same as what I’ve seen before then any change of status of a message (instead of deleting one) will cause the Inbox to update with new messages. Could you try that please?”

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Have you tried to repair your Outlook profile? See Fix your Outlook email connection by repairing your profile (microsoft.com) for instructions.

If that does not work, have you tried creating a new Outlook profile?

--Joe

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lmacri, Kathy Stevens

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joep517

The repair you suggested may have worked, but there still appears to be a large amount of garbage floders in the Account that is of issue.

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Repairing the Outlook profile did not work.

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I am beginning to think that there may be sync issues in the Outlook 2016 Account that is giving us the inbox mail problem.

There are a number of sites that address the issue including:

https://www.remosoftware.com/info/fix-outlook-sync-errors

https://www.stellarinfo.com/blog/fix-outlook-synchronization-log-issues/

The decision for us now is to backup and uninstall Office 2016, run the Office Removal Tool, and start over or try to clean up the possible sync issues following the instructions offered in the two sites above.

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We are backing up the system now and are going to reinstall Office 2016.

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When I started this topic, we were having a problem with Outlook on one of our Windows 10 Pro workstations and were considering removing Microsoft Office 2016 from the machine and reinstalling it in order to address the issue.

At the time, we were having two problems with Outlook:

1. Incoming e-mail was stacking up on the host’s server and only downloading when we deleted a message from the Inbox, deleted a message from Trash, or sent a New Email (an apparent sync issue), and
2. We were noticing an incredibly large number of duplicate emails on the email server host’s server.

In an attempt to solve the problem, we:

1. Ran the “Online Repair” tool for Microsoft Office 2016 without success;
2. Went into Outlook’s Account Settings and ran the “Repair Tool” on the troublesome email account without success;
3. Made several attempts to address the “Outlook Sync Issues” without success;
4. Uninstalled Office 2016 and ran the “Microsoft Office Removal Tool” to remove all traces of the app from the workstation without success (apparently the “Account” is stored as a data file and is not considered to be part of Office itself); and
5. Deleted the problematic Account from Outlook and then created a new account – success; then
6. All we had to do was recover the Account’s inbox, sent messages, calendar, and contacts from backups.

Microsoft Outlook 2016 is now back up and running.

Over time we will need to remove the duplicate emails contained in the inbox and sent messages folders by hand.

Again, we did not need to uninstall Microsoft Office to correct the sync issue. All we needed to do was remove the troublesome account from Outlook and then set it up again.

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lmacri, GoneToPlaid, joep517

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