Site Collection Feature won't go away

Question

I have a custom Feature, with Site Collection scope, that won't go away even after I delete the Web Application, the Content Database, the IIS Web Site.

I have uninstalled the Solution that contained the feature, and stsadm -o enumsolutions shows nothing. I'm not sure whether any of the SharePoint PowerShell commandlets could enumerate solutions as well.

When I create a new Web Application and a new Site Collection, the custom Feature is in the list of Site Collection Features for the new Site Collection.

I've tried rebooting and resetting IIS.

How can I find what's causing this? Could it be a farm-scoped feature that remains? If so, how do I find it? And how do I remove it?

Answer 1

I would guess when you uninstalled the solution, for whatever reason the feature didn't get uninstalled properly.

You can uninstall it using stsadm as follows

stsadm -o uninstallfeature -name {MyFeatureName}

where {MyFeatureName} is the name of the folder the feature sits in the FEATURES folder in the SharePoint hive.

stsadm -o uninstallfeature -id {GUID}

where {GUID} is the ID of the Feature. If you don't know this, you can find it by inspecting the HTML around the "Activate" button in the ManageFeatures page.