How can I fully and cleanly uninstall the MCR on Windows?

I am developing a program to be deployed on a machine that does not have MATLAB installed and has not previously installed any versions of MATLAB Runtime. If the end user wants to uninstall the MCR for any reason, what does the uninstallation process look like for the MCR and do I need to do anything extra in case there are leftover files?

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

Depending on the version of the MCR installed, the default installation directory for Windows starting with R2015a is:

C:\Program Files\MATLAB\MATLAB Runtime\vXX

where the "XX" indicates the MCR version. In the "uninstall" folder, there is an "uninstall" runnable that will perform the uninstallation process.

When running the uninstaller, it will:

• remove most of the files in the installation directory.
• make the necessary changes to the system environment path variables to remove the runtime installation path.
• revert the changes made to the system registry.

The uninstaller may leave some files behind in the installation directory, which can be manually deleted with administrator privileges. The fact that there may be leftover files is noted at the end of the uninstallation process as well. There may also be some files remaining in some temporary directories, but these will be cleaned up by the computer. You can read more about the uninstallation process here:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/compiler/install-the-matlab-runtime.html#bvf6cbg