When Removing Outlook for Windows Using PowerShell and then deleting profile it strips all apps

Hola Amy,

I think two separate things are happening here, and I would be careful not to treat the missing Appx packages as a normal side effect of removing Outlook.

The Outlook commands you posted are scoped to Microsoft.OutlookForWindows, so by themselves they should not remove unrelated Appx packages.

There is also an important difference between these two Appx operations:

Remove-AppxPackage removes a package registration from an existing user.

Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage removes the package from the Windows image's provisioning store, which controls what Windows stages for users when a new profile is created.

For new Outlook specifically, Microsoft now recommends removing the provisioned package directly from the image. Their current guidance is:

Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -AllUsers -Online -PackageName (Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.OutlookForWindows).PackageFullName

What makes me pause is the part where everything works for a newly logged-in domain user, but other Appx packages disappear after you remove that profile and prepare the image. Deleting an ordinary user profile should not deprovision unrelated applications from the Windows image.

Appx packages actually have two layers of state: the package can be provisioned in the OS image for future users, while each user also has an individual registration of that package. Imaging problems tend to appear when those two states get out of sync. Sysprep specifically validates this, and Microsoft documents failures where an Appx package is installed for a user but is no longer provisioned for all users.

Before changing anything else, I would compare the provisioned packages before and after whatever step is removing the profile: Get-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online | Select-Object DisplayName,PackageName | Sort-Object DisplayName

If packages actually disappear from that list after deleting the profile, then something other than a normal profile deletion is modifying the image.

Could you clarify exactly how you are removing the domain user's profile? For example, are you deleting it through System Properties > User Profiles, removing C:\Users<username> manually, using a script, or running Sysprep/CopyProfile as part of that step?

I would also be interested in how you are capturing the image. If this is a generalized Windows image, the cleaner approach is to build/customize it in Audit Mode, remove unwanted provisioned applications there, and then run Sysprep /generalize /oobe before capture, rather than signing in with a normal domain user and deleting that profile afterward.

If you post the profile-removal/capture steps and the output of Get-AppxProvisionedPackage before and after that step, we should be able to pinpoint where the other packages are actually being removed.

Thanks,

James