You are a sysadmin w/ 10+ years of experience. Bloated Windows image is truncated to as minimum as possible, with .NET 3.5, vcredist, printer patch et al. packed.
You have a happy life.
Now you install the de facto go-to gaming platform on PC, which is still 32-bit as of 2024, and comes with a service vulnerable to local privilege escalation. You install your good old game, and,
all of a sudden, since you have 1000Mbps network,
a warning pops up reminding you Steam attempted to install a runtime you've packed already, and failed. You become angry, as it's the I-dunno-probably-50th time Steam try to offend you this way.
So you spent 10 minutes searching and wrote a script to prevent Steam from installing commonredist, and 30 minutes later discovered it could just be done via registry.
That's the birth of anti-steam-commonredist.
no-really-common-redist.reg is recommended as OpenAL/PhysX/XNA are rarely used nowadays and chances are you can't find an installer more reliable than the one Steam provides.
| Variant | Blocked content |
|---|---|
| no-directx.reg | DirectX |
| no-dotnet-framework.reg | .Net Framework |
| no-vcredist.reg | vcredist |
| no-really-common-redist.reg | .NET, DirectX & vcredist |
| no-steam-commonredist.reg | .NET, DirectX, vcredist, XNA, PhysX, OpenAL |
- As a general reminder, ALWAYS backup your registry before messing with it!
- Download your favored variant, backup registry, import registry, done.
This is only tested on 64-bit Windows 10/11 system.
32-bit system is not supported, but you may change HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Valve\Steam\Apps\CommonRedist to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Valve\Steam\Apps\CommonRedist and give a try.
If you use regular user without administrator privilege, change HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE (aka. HKLM) to HKEY_CURRENT_USER (aka. HKCU) before importing. Keep in mind you need to do it for every user with Steam access on your system if so.
This only prevent Steam from installing commonredist, those runtime still need to be installed. I recommend vcredist, or alternatively if you use package manager like winget, Chocolatey or Scoop, just install from that.
For more details (TBH there is none), check my blog post 阻止 Steam 安装 Windows 运行库.