How to remove Windows Phone 8.1 Emulators from Visual Studio 2013

I finally got a fix for this on my machine which is running Windows 7 professional SP1 and Visual Studio 2013 with update 5.

you first need to edit the

"extension.vsixmanifest"

file located in this directory(or equivalent):

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\ProductUpdate\WPEmulator\8.1

on line 4 change the version to 8.1.0.0, so it should look like this:

<Identity Id="Microsoft.Windows.Phone.Emulator.8.1" Version="8.1.0.0" Language="en-us" Publisher="Microsoft"/>

Then run this from a command window/DOS prompt:

"\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.com" /setup

Do one thing , WP8.1 SDK comes as a part of VS2013 Edition. Go to Control Panel ->Add/Remove Programs->Select Visual Studio -> Modify and uncheck the Windows phone SDK there

You wont have the issue then but beware that WP SDK will be uninstalled

This is the best solution: Total-Uninstaller

It's an Open Source project focused on this:

Windows software uninstaller. Especially useful for speeding up Visual Studio by removing some of the bloats. Requires admin rights to run.

I was struggling a lot with this limitation and I found this software, if someone is having the same challenge, I highly recommend it.