How can I uninstall a keyboard that Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator created?
Normally you can uninstall a keyboard using the following method:
- Go to add/remove programs
- Find the keyboard, it should be the same name as the Description field of the project's properties in Keyboard Layout Creator.
- Press Modify
- Choose Remove the keyboard layout
The problem was that I uninstalled it incorrectly and I had to manually remove it.
If you need to manually remove it, here's how I did it:
- Remove the keyboard from the Language and Regional settings:
- Control Panel > Regional and Language Options > Languages > Details...
- If it exists as one of the installed services, you should remove it. You can do this by adding another keyboard (e.g.
US
) and making it the default one, then removing the keyboard you are trying to get rid of.
- Open regedit
- Warning: you should backup your registry in case you accidentally delete something important.
- Navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layouts\
- Find the key that represents your keyboard: (referred to as "the key" in following steps)
- It should be in the form
XXXXXXXX
(an 8 hex digit number). - Each key should have values such as: Layout Display Name, Layout File, Layout Id, Layout Product Code, Layout Text.
- The
Layout Text
property should match the keyboard name that you chose. - Mine was near the end and started with an
a
instead of a0
like all the others.
- It should be in the form
- Take a look at the Layout File which should be a
.dll
name. I will refer to it as "the dll" in the following steps. - Look for the dll in
C:\WINDOWS\system32\dllcache
and delete it if it exists. - Look for the dll in
C:\WINDOWS\system32
and delete it if it exists. - Go to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout\DosKeybCodes
and see if it has aName
which is equal to the key's name (e.g.XXXXXXXX
) and a value such asen
. If it does, delete it. - Navigate back to the key (from step 5), and delete the entire key.