Crashing and can't uninstall

[moleface237]

I was running GTAV on a Windows 10 PC with graphics mods via OpenIV, but the game started crashing at the title screen after a Rockstar title update a couple months ago. I wasn't using ScriptHook, but I've had issues with game updates breaking mods before, so I didn't think anything of it and have been playing my backlog of other games in the meantime.

 

Last night I tried starting GTAV through the official launcher instead of using OpenIV, but I got the same crash. Before I resorted to re-downloading the game, I went to Windows 10's app/program manager, clicked "modify" (for some reason, Rockstar doesn't allow a straight-up "uninstall" to appear on the programs list, and instead you have to click "modify" and then choose between "repair" or "uninstall')  and launched the repair tool. It said it completed repairs, but I still got the same crash, so I went back to uninstall the game. But this time, when I clicked on "modify" to begin uninstalling, it gave me an error:

 

Error Code:    -5001 : 0x80070002
Error Information:
>SetupNew\setup.cpp (1220)
PAPP:Grand Theft Auto V
PVENDOR:Rockstar Games (http://www.RockstarGames.com)
PGUID:5EFC6C07-6B87-43FC-9524-F9E967241741
$18.0.329
@Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 0 (9200) 
IE Version: 9.11.17134.0

 

First of all, I'm not even running the game in compatibility mode for Windows 7, so that's already weird. Anyway, I tried this a dozen or so more times, even restarting the computer before retrying, with no luck.

 

I decided to just re-download the full game and point its installation path to the old GTA V folder, so it'd hopefully overwrite the old files and give me a fresh install. But nope - instead I then had two different versions of GTAV listed on the program manager, and neither worked. The new download gave me an "ERR_GFX_D3D_INIT" error. 

 

Eventually I just uninstalled the new copy along with Social Club, then went into the registry and deleted all GTAV-associated entries. Weirdly, this didn't get rid of the older copy of GTAV, plus it doesn't even show up on the "uninstall" list in the registry, even though it's still listed on Windows 10's app/program manager. Unless I'm missing something in the registry, it seems that there's no way to delete it from my system.

 

I re-downloaded and reinstalled GTAV again today after wiping all remnants of the game from my PC, and I'm still getting the "ERR_GFX_D3D_INIT" error, and two different copies of the game are still listed under my program manager.

 

Am I missing registry entries that I should've deleted? It's odd that I can't even get the older version off my programs list after deleting all the registry entries. I'd like to avoid re-installing the entire OS, but I'm starting to think that might be the only option.

[moleface237]

I hate to bump my own post, but I resolved the problem.

 

I don't normally bother with third party PC tune-up software like registry cleaners, but I was able to fix the issue today with CCleaner. After I used this program to delete GTAV from my list of installed programs and then reinstalled the game, it's working again. No idea why manually deleting the registry entries didn't work for me, but whatever.

 

This was actually the longest I've gone without playing GTAV since it came out.