How to remove all remnants of a VS extension after deinstalation from VS 2017?

Question

I downloaded and installed Telerik's WinForms components demo and removed it later. However, the VS extension that adds the Telerik menu in the main menu system was not removed correctly. After deinstallation, my VS started to display about 10 message boxes at startup telling that Telerik assemblies like Telerik.WinControls.VSPackage.2018.1.115.1 cannot be loaded. Here is the corresponding part of the VS startup log (the ActivityLog.xml file viewed in the browser):

I asked Telerik's support about this problem and posted a message on their community forums, but nobody has answered yet - even after several days.

Having no answer, I tried to find all remnants of the problem extension in VS folders and the system registry and cleaned all what I found, but VS is still trying to load some "tails" of this non-existing Telerik extension.

Is there a way to trace and clear all remnants of a VS extension left by its uninstaller (manually or automatically using a tool)?

Answer 1

I got an answer to my question from the Telerik team:

Visual Studio 2017 uses its own private registry to store this king of information - C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\15.0_8ab640ac\privateregistry.bin. Removing this file should resolve the issue on your side. The file will be auto-generated by Visual Studio once it is launched.

Note: You if choose to delete the file your personal preferences regarding the Visual Studio IDE environment will be reset to the default ones and you may need to set up them in the Options dialog.

Frankly speaking, I could not try what they suggested. I suddenly discovered that my instance of VS no longer tries to load any Telerik assembly at startup. I think it happened after upgrading to the latest version 15.5.7, which was done with the administrator privileges. I earlier launched VS with admin rights several times, and as I saw, some problem Telerik entries (but not all) were cleared by VS automatically in this mode. It seems, VS can heal itself in the admin and/or upgrade mode.