One or more packages could not be completely uninstalled

I have an ASP.NET MVC 4 application. I used NuGet to update all of the NuGet packages that were installed when I created the application. One of the packages was Microsoft.Bcl.Build.

After updating these, NuGet displayed the following message at the bottom of its window: NuGet error showing "One or more packages could not be completely uninstalled: Microsoft.Bcl.Build.1.0.7. Restart Visual Studio to finish uninstall."

I have since restarted Visual Studio several times, but the message still exists. When I checked the installed packages, it did appear that the updated version (1.0.8) of the package was present.

How can I fix this?


Instead of deleting all of ~/packages, see if there are any *.deleteme files in ~/packages and delete them. Then restart Visual Studio.


I believe this problem is caused by the packages being read-only or otherwise inaccessible at the file system level.

Packages under source control

Temporary work-around (untested)

Check out the entire packages folder prior to telling NuGet to restart Visual Studio to delete the packages.

Permanent work-around

I found that this could be permanently resolved by removing the packages from source control and instead using NuGet Package Restore.

Packages not under source control

Temporary Work-Around

I worked around this by deleting from the solution's packages folder all of the files that referenced the package in question. Specifically, these were:

  1. Folder: Microsoft.Bcl.Build.1.0.7
  2. File: Microsoft.Bcl.Build.1.0.7.deleteme

In my case, the relevant package folders remained in ~\packages, although they were empty. I deleted the folders and restarted Visual Studio, and this warning went away.


I've just deleted the folders of each package that had error in the Packages folder in my solution folder and also deleted the .deleteme files and everything works fine!