Uninstalling an app from Windows 8 is deadly easy. It’s so easy that sometime you may want to figure out a way to stop people from removing apps you want them to stay there. I can see that it could be painful to IT people keeping reinstalling apps back to their users’ computer over and over.
Fortunately, there is a way of doing so. And it’s not that difficult at all. Thanks to theWindowsClub for sharing this tip. Basically, you are doing it through local group policy.
1. Open Local Policy Editor, by pressing Win + R, typing gpedit.msc, and pressing Enter.
2. Navigator to the following location:
User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Start Menu and Taskbar
3. Select the entry “Prevent users from uninstalling applications from Start” and enable it.
4. Because it’s a user configuration, you will have to either reboot your computer or manually refresh the group policy by running the following command in Command Prompt to have the change taken effect.
gpupdate /force
Once the change has taken effect, you won’t be able to see the remove app option from the option list in Start screen.
Equivalently, you can archive the same via a registry change. Just simply go to the following location in regedit, and create or set a registry entry as DWORD (32bit) named NoUninstallFromStart to 1.
HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Explorer
