А почему это я не могу удалить сборку из GAC-а?

Очередной раз наткнулся на то, что не могу удалить сборку из GAC-а. Природа такого поведения понятна: при установке сборок в GAC можно вести список приложений, которым эта сборка нужна и тогда gacutil, при попытке удаления говорит:

Unable to uninstall: assembly is required by one or more applications Pending references:

SCHEME: ID: DESCRIPTION:<Windows Installer>

После быстрого серфинга в инете нашел следующее решение:

If you encounter this problem, it is very likely that you have run into an odd MSI registry corruption (at the time of this writing, the cause is unknown). Without getting into a long-winded explanation of how this registry corruption eventually results in the error message above, the common cause of this is a bogus default value set under one (or both) of the below registry keys:

[HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Installer\Assemblies\Global]

[HKLM\SOFTWARE\Classes\Installer\Assemblies\Global]

If these keys are not empty (e.g. they contain a MSI descriptor value), then you have hit this situation, and you should be able to fix the problem by clearing the default value. I can't guarantee that this will always work, but it has definitely been our experience that this is the most common source of this problem.