Hi, I’m the developer at Brave who’s mostly responsible for the Omaha integration.
First a brief point about registry keys and services being left behind: Yes, some registry keys stay around forever after uninstallation. This behavior comes from Google’s implementation. But there is also cleanup that occurs some time after uninstalling Brave. Specifically, when Brave is uninstalled but the updater (“Omaha”) is still on the system, then after a few hours, the updater runs, sees that Brave is no longer installed, and uninstalls itself and its own services. So, there are some services and registry entries that only disappear a few hours after uninstalling Brave.
@rgrindley if I understood correctly, then you still have C:\Program Files (x86)\BraveSoftware\Update\BraveUpdate.exe on your system. Could you try the following steps?
- Press the Start Menu button
- Type “cmd”
- Right-click on the entry that appears and select “Run as administrator”. So you’ll run the Windows Command Prompt as admin.
- Paste the following into the command prompt:
“C:\Program Files (x86)\BraveSoftware\Update\BraveUpdate.exe" /uninstall - Press Enter.
If it worked, then the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\BraveSoftware\Update should disappear from your system in the next minute or so. Then, you can uninstall and re-install Brave as per @clifton’s instructions.