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Successful Uninstall of February CTP SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2005 Express

Since I guess that many people will in the next few days be attempting to uninstall SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 or CTP builds I thought it might be helpful to describe the steps I took to (seemingly) successfully uninstall SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition and SQL Server 2005 Express February CTP builds.

This describes my personal experience. If your operating system or other circumstances differ then you may be better taking a different approach.

I had installed on Windows Server 2003 RTM. No hotfixes. No SP1.

I used Add/Remove Programs to uninstall items in the following order. The CTPNotes.mht document indicates that order of uninstall is very important. I was using the version for the February CTP and making some guesses, which I hoped were intelligent ones, about how this would apply to unistalling February CTP itself.

1. Remove SQL Server 2005 February CTP
2. Remove SQL Server 2005 Express February CTP
3. Remove Analysis Services February CTP
4. Remove Data Transformation Services CTP. The label has not yet been updated to "Integration Services".
5. Remove Notification Services
6. Remove Reporting Services
7. Remove SQL Server Tools. Note that this also removes Visual Studio - at least it does if you have only Business Intelligence Development Studio on the machine. Note that it fails to remove the Visual Studio item from Add/Remove Programs at the time of seeming uninstall.
8. Remove SQL Native Client
9. At this point I ran into circumstances not covered by the February CTPNotes.mht. I decided to next remove Analysis Services samples
10. Remove SQL Server samples
11. Remove Express Manager
12. Both MSXML6 and SQLXML4 still showed in Add/Remove Programs. I tried to remove those but received an error message.
13. I removed SQL Server Setup Support Files. MSXML6 and SQLXML4 items disappeared from Add/Remove programs. Around this stage the Visual Studio item also disappeared, although I believe it had been uninstalled a few steps before.
14. Remove .NET Framework 2.0

I then successfully installed Visual Studio Standard Beta 2 with SQL Express April CTP on the same machine. Initial testing indicated a working install both of Visual Studio and of SQL Express.