How To Uninstall or Remove a Revit Add-In

I've been getting this question quite a bit recently:
"How do I remove an Add-In from Revit?"

This post will not focus on what an Add-In is nor what an Add-In manifest is... hopefully you already have an idea or can find out about those things here.

The uninstall solution depends on the version of Revit that you are running. The method that I will discuss in this post is suitable for Revit 2011 and newer. If you are using Revit 2010 then you just need to go ahead and upgrade your shiz.

There are two locations that Add-In manifests can be placed to load into Revit. The paths shown below are for Windows7. If you are still running Windows XP than it may be time to update your other shiz.

Machine Wide Location
The first is available to all users that log into the machine and requires administrative privileges to add files to.

• C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\Revit\Addins\

User Profile Location

The user profile location will only load for the current user. This location does not require administrative privileges and therefor anyone can install Revit Add-Ins into their environment if they use this location.

• %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\Revit\Addins\

Preventing the Add-In from Loading
There's a bunch of ways to prevent an Add-In from loading into Revit.

• Removing the associated .addin file from either of the locations mentioned above will prevent the Add-In from loading into Revit. You can leave the .dll and all other files there if you want and they will not load without the associated .addin file instructing Revit to do so.
• Another trick is to simply rename the extension of the .addin file to something like .addin.notloaded or something to keep it from loading.
• Revit 2011 and 2012 do not load .addin files that are placed in sub-directories of these Add-In manifest directories either, so you could just simply create a sub-directory for the Add-Ins that you don't want to be loaded and place them in that sub directory.