How to uninstall a windows service and delete its files without rebooting

Solution 1:

sc delete "service name"

will delete a service. I find that the sc utility is much easier to locate than digging around for installutil. Remember to stop the service if you have not already.

Solution 2:

I had sort of the same problem as you. I have a system service that i want to uninstall and afterwards reinstall as part of an update. On certain systems this would not work without a reboot. The problem was that a call to DeleteService() would return ok, but the following call to CreateService() would tell me the service was still there, but marked for deletion (error code 1072). The registry would reflect that, since the subkey was still there (under HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services), but "DeleteFlag" was set to 1. From that point on, only a reboot could fix the situation.

Some things that don't work:

• Using "sc delete": it had the same problems as I. The call would return ok, but the service was not really gone and still in the registry with DeleteFlag = 1.
• Deleting the key in the registry. The Service Manager seems to keep a database in memory and the registry is just a copy of it for the next boot.
• Adding wait loops, waiting for .exe files to be ready to be overwritten, killing the process, etc.
• Closing handles to the service. Which ones??

But here is what worked:

I noticed in some articles here on stackoverflow that net.exe has start/stop features as well (I only knew of sc.exe utility). And strangely enough, a "net stop svcname" plus a "sc delete svcname" worked! So net.exe must do something I don't do.

But net.exe doesn't contain an import to ControlService(), so how does it stop the service? I found out that net.exe spawns net1.exe, but net1.exe doesn't import ControlService() as well. I used the great API Monitor utility ( http://www.rohitab.com/apimonitor ) to see what net1.exe is doing, but it never called anything that looked promising.

But then I saw that it imports NetServiceControl() from NETAPI32.DLL (that had at least "Service" in its name!). MSDN says that this function is obsolete. Nevertheless, I found the prototype in LMSvc.h and some parameter description here: http://cyberkinetica.homeunix.net/os2tk45/srvfpgr/369_L2_NetServiceControlorN.html . When you load NETAPI32.DLL and use NetServiceControl(NULL, service_name, 3, 0, 0) (3 is for SERVICE_CTRL_UNINSTALL, which is used to stop) the service is stopped afterwards. And it can be deleted and reinstalled afterwards without DeleteFlag or reboot!

So it was never a problem of deleting, but of stopping the service properly. And NetServiceControl() does the trick. Sorry for the long post, but I thought it might help someone with similar problems. (Just for reference, I use Win7 SP1 x64.)