While I thank you for your response and suggestions, I also realize that your skill set and experience are a pay grade above mine — maybe several pay grades above. I am just a self-taught computer user who is grateful to be have been able to use a great browser like Brave for so long without having any problems. The technical support team at Brave is amazing and I am lucky to have access to their keen brains.
So I hope some of your examples will save the day and I’ll be able to salvage my passwords and bookmarks, but if not, I’ll find my way and be happy.
Be well, Rita
| Emi
July 21 |
The thing is, just looking at your screenshots you have a bunch ‘crap’ installed that might lock Brave so it doesn’t get uninstalled.
Instead of using taskkill, try using wmic process where name="brave.exe" call terminate
or use powershell Stop-Process command example: Get-Process -Name brave | Stop-Process -Force
Also, in your case, what I would do is try to remove Brave from Program files, if the file is being locked (because the process is active) you could see if some other program is locking it and stopping it from closing. But once you remove C:\Program Files\BraveSoftware\BraveBrowser Brave shouldn’t start, which means you should be able to uninstall it.
If somehow that didn’t work, I would try removing all traces of it from registry, because the updater only sees what it is on the registry, once updater doesn’t see any Brave product, it will uninstall itself.
Also, you could try to remove Brave manually through CMD, all you need to do is go to C:\Program files\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\Application\Version number\Installer then you open CMD there and just type setup.exe --uninstall --chrome-sxs --system-level and see what happens.
But If you don’t want to keep with it and just want to use Brave Beta, User Data is the ‘same’ across Brave and works similar across Chromium browsers.
So all you need to do is go to %localappdata%\BraveSoftware\ here you will find Brave-Browser-Beta and Brave-Browser and just removing or renaming Brave-Browser-Beta and then renaming Brave-Browser to Brave-Browser-Beta will give you your passwords and everything back, only some settings will be modified in case of new features but that’s it.
The problem is if you had something installed that was causing Brave to crash.
Did you try restarting the PC and then uninstall Brave? because Brave shouldn’t start unless you tested opening and then it crashed and the processes stayed there.
But in that case you have to see if it is the currect Stable User-Data the problem, in that case you have to remove Brave-Browser-Beta and just copy and paste Brave-Browser to create a backup and rename it to Brave-Browser-Beta, if your browser doesn’t start, well, it has to be something in the LocalState file, like a flag, or Preferences file in Default folder, you can rename the files and try again, you can even do it with the stable version, but since Beta works, it would be good to try it there.
I mean you could easily go to CMD and "C:\Program Files\BraveSoftware\BraveBrowser\Application\brave.exe --user-data-dir="%localappdata%\BraveSoftware\TempFolder\" hit enter and see if the problem is some file in your user data and not the browser itself, because your browser will temporary use a new user data (you have to remove it manually afterwards). then you can just troubleshoot by renaming or deleting files from the normal user data, like preferences, which will reset some settings but not too many.
Also you can start Brave with --disable-extensions --no-experiments and that way you will run the browser with nothing like flags or extensions to see if it was one of those causing issues.
It looks easy to troubleshoot, but like I said, if you want to just use a browser, then you can always copy files from Brave-Browser to Brave-Browser-Beta Default folder, like bookmarks, login data, history, web data, shortcuts, favicons, so you can get most of the important stuff, unless you want to do it the other way, copy and paste the whole folder and rename, and delete files until it works.
