I could be wrong, but I think that it is best to uninstall these updates/patches before uninstalling the app itself. I have a test computer (a virtual machine) that I can test some things on before giving out advice here. I uninstalled .NET 4.5 from that test computer and it did no take very long to complete the uninstall (~2 minutes). The updates to .NET 4.5 were no longer listed as being installed. Maybe they were uninstalled automatically or maybe just hidden. I would have to do more digging to be sure.
I then installed .NET 4 onto the test computer (which took ~10 minutes) and checked for updates (which took ~30 minutes). There were 9 updates (200MB+). Older computers can have more than 20 updates to .NET 4, but those updates have been consolidated in to the 9 that you would get if you were just now installing .NET 4.
I uninstalled .NET 4 - it took less than 1 minute - the 9 updates were no longer listed.
Maybe nothing can be concluded from those times. Maybe there is very little work to be done when deleting tons of files. Maybe the install times are so long because files have to be decompressed, verified
and then installed (registry entries made and checked).
Until I can verify that each update is indeed backed out when the .NET 4 app is uninstalled via the Programs and Features applet via the control panel, my advice will be to back them out manually.
That said, even if the updates are not uninstalled and you only removed .NET 4 via the Programs and Features applet via the control panel, it is not going to cause you problems - you just might have extra junk installed that you don't need.
If you want to manually remove these updates:
Go to
Start
Type
View Installed Updates into the field named
Search programs and files
Double click on the update of interest
If you want to see this being done for an Internet Explorer update, watch the video in this post:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/112121-internet-explorer-9-uninstall-2.html#post2319908
I clicked on Uninstall button since it is hard to "see" a double click in a video
Again, this is going to take you a while since .NET 4 has been heavily patched. And you might have to restart several times (hopefully not); but the end result is worth it.
After you get rid of all of the updates/patches for .NET 4 (and .NET 4 extended - if you have those) --- then you can uninstall .NET 4 and .NET 4 extended using the Programs and Features applet via the control panel. You might not have
.NET 4 extended.
