I know how to uninstall programs and such, however, I have a theme that is called AlienwareRed, and I can't find where the uninstall is for it. This theme changed all the icons etc,.
I've changed the theme to a different one, but the icons are still the ones from AlienwareRed, so I'd like to uninstall it.
I can't find it in Uninstall Programs.
It's not there under Uninstall Programs. When I do a search in Windows Explorer for Skinpack Alienred I get the .exe file but that's it.
Then I see it under Personalization, but right-clicking doesn't give me the option to uninstall. I can delete it but that won't change the icons etc.
Go to : C:\Windows\Resources\Themes
This is the directory where all windows themes and custom themes are installed to, Before going there what you want to do is select another theme other than the one you want to uninstall, I usually select the default Windows theme, then reboot so that the theme you are going to uninstall is removed from memory, if you do not reboot it will remain in memory and will not be able to fully delete it.
After rebooting go to the directory above and delete the corresponding .theme file and the entire folder associated with it. I don't use skinpacks and personally wouldn't touch them with a twenty foot stick, I manually install all of my themes but I am assuming that the theme file would be named something like AlienwareRed.theme and the theme folder named the same or something real similar without a .theme extension.
After that the theme should be entirely removed and you will no longer see it on your personalization page.
If there are still remnants of the theme left over after you deleted everything, like icons and such, you will have to open an elevated command prompt ( right clicking on cmd and select run as administrator) and run the command sfc \scannow after running the scan (it will take a little while) you should see if it has found errors, if it did it will tell you the errors will be fixed on the next reboot, close the cmd window and reboot. That should ensure everything is removed, if not, I am sorry to say you will need to do a system restore or reset.
In the future I would steer clear of such things like Skinpacks and such and learn how to manually install themes yourself, if a theme artist cannot supply you with just the .theme file and the folder that goes with it then I would not install it, NO MATTER how bad assed the theme looked, installing themes from an .exe file just leaves the door wide open to something nasty being installed on your system or changes being made that you really did not want changed.
Now, I'm not saying that this is what Skinpacks is doing but personally when it comes to custom themes I want to know exactly what is being installed on my system , not all theme artists are alike, some are very good and can be trusted while others not so good and I wouldn't trust them as far as I can spit.
Last edited by Dark Knight; 24 Feb 2016 at 17:32.
Actually themes are installed to the user theme folder. C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\Appdata\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Themes
You can delete any theme safely here. But it will not change your Icons. You can do that yourself by right clicking and selecting Properties.
The skin pack probably included an icon packager (iPack),
it should have an uninstaller somewhere.
And what about running sfc /scannow
Most 3rd party themes are turned off that way.
Beware though, if its, patched, there is a possibility that your system will go
and if you haven't created a system image BEFORE installing the theme, you might have to reinstall Windows. @Edwin can tell you about this from many many experiments/experiences.
Thank you all so much for the help. I appreciate it. you've been a great help
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