I'm glad you're gone, Skype.

"That worked… for about an hour, until Skype self healed like a very blue and very Microsoft branded Wolverine."

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Skype has been the bane of my existence since about six months ago, when my employer tasked me with removing it from every endpoint in our environment. “Easy enough,” you might think: write a script in SCCM/MECM, or in my case, BigFix, ensure the relevance is functional, deploy the script, and finally uninstall it. Can’t be that hard, right? Wrong. Very wrong.

It turns out it’s a little more complicated than that. Allow me to explain. Skype for Business is bundled into the Office Click‑to‑Run package; it isn’t installed as a standalone  (at least not in our environment), so trying to peel it off without touching the rest of Office is like pulling thread from a sweater. Some Skype DLLs and executables are baked so deeply into Teams and the Office suite that you never know which shared libraries might break if you yank them out.

You’d think a company that preaches “modular deployments” would provide an easy way to decouple components but you should really lower your personal expectations, after all Microsoft is a small company, with limited resources, charitably valued at only three trillion dollars…

To reiterate my task (for god knows what reason) was to remove Skype without uninstalling office. A task that would prove nearly impossible. There are current forum posts by numerous and more experienced engineers in loftier positions that I echoing that they too, were having issues coming up with a good solution to remove it. Originally having heard echoes of Skype’s tenacious nature previously (the wails of agony echo loudly in this industry), I attempted a dirty uninstall on a test machine. Por ejemplo, I made a script and deployed a BigFix Action to remove all associated “lync.exe (standalone), lync99.exe (the C2R version), and Skype for Business Shortcuts. If you’re curious why it’s called Lync, it’s because Skype for Business is essentially just a rebranded product from 2010 called “Lync” that did pretty much the same thing. The more you know… The install paths will also be different depending on either a MSI/C2R installation, a potentially important distinction if you'd like to try this yourself.

That worked… for about an hour, until Skype self healed like a very blue and very Microsoft branded Wolverine. Cool. Didn’t think a dirty uninstall was a great solution anyway.

Next, I reached out to the talented engineers over at Microsoft. I don't say that tongue in cheek, they work long hours, often in time zones that are anything but convenient for them. They looked at our environment and said they'd get back to us with a solution – which implied to me that they didn’t have one already, which I found kind of strange. Weeks went by. Crickets chirped. Three generations of mice were born. My 2 year old turned 2.06 - an important milestone. Point is,  time passed. I digress, they eventually get back to us saying none of the methods they attempted worked, and asked to mirror our environment so they could create a custom script for an uninstall/reinstall for the entirety of office. For those curious, it was a .vbs script. Quite lenghty, actually. Unfortunately, that didn't work, and our support contract ran out so we were unable to follow up.

So, on we go. If this journey was the Oregon trail, we'd surely be on our second bout of dysentery by now. But not to worry, the will power of a man who doesn't want to be unemployed rivals that of our pioneer, west bound ancestors. Most Def.

Entonces, we reached out to other departments within our oganization’s parent organization, which we are already a very large organization so, things were getting serious. These guys were the real deal. The Navy Seals, the Delta force, the Walker Texas Ranger's of our institution. Their solution was just to remove shortcuts and disable skype on start up because they couldn't do it either… Face. Palm.

Of course I didn't fault them - that would've been good enough for me, it's not like it posed any sort of security vulnerability at the time but our leadership was very clear, they wanted it eradicated – ASAP, not just hidden from our user base.

Finally, we turned to the Office Deployment Tool (ODT) and a custom configuration XML. The plan: deploy ODT with an exclude for the “Skype” component, forcing a repair of Office without Skype. We downloaded the ODT package, wrote a configuration.xml with <ExcludeApp ID="SkypeforBusinessRetail" />, and ran:

ODT.exe /configure configuration.xml

In theory, BigFix pushes that out, and Office reconfigures itself. In practice, it wiped Office completely and never reinstalled, because BigFix (running as SYSTEM) couldn’t reach the Microsoft CDN to fetch the Click‑to‑Run payload. The fix was to predownload the Office installation files to a network share, point SourcePath in the XML to that share, and use only /configure so it installs from local cache. Once we did that, Office reinstalled minus Skype. Yay.

So yes, I got it working. Maybe. I think I got it figured out now. Probably not... Regardless.

Screw you Skype.

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