Forum Discussion
Program Uninstalling By Iteself
I've installed a piece of software on my computer. The last 3 weeks the software has been susccessfully removed each sunday at 1am. I install it again, the next week it's done. I've looked at event logs, but it just says "system" as the user. I don't see any scheduled tasks that would be doing this, and nothing related to this is showing up in configuration manager logs.
Where should i go from here to identify what is kicking off the uninstall of my software each week?
4 Replies
A possible source of the mystery is a debloating or system optimization tool. For example, the Windows 11 utility Winhance creates a scheduled task called BloatRemoval after use. Its job is to run every time the system starts to ensure selected software stays uninstalled. This matches your experience perfectly: a removal task set to run periodically, which could easily be weekly, that deletes targeted software in the background.
That is a very odd and frustrating problem to have. Software doesn't just vanish on its own, especially at a scheduled time. The good news is that the consistency of the pattern (every Sunday at 1 am) is the biggest clue, and it points to a few very specific, non-random causes.
Simply monitor the msiexec.exe process and filter for the process ID corresponding to the uninstaller to identify the parent process that triggered the uninstallation.
Use the Process Monitor tool to monitor the msiexec.exe process, filter for the process ID corresponding to the uninstaller, and trace the parent process that triggered the uninstallation.
