I had Live 10 installed on a windows computer and when I try to remove it and install 12 (I've tried with a few versions from sister site) and everytime I try to launch Live 12 I get a blue wheel for a second and then nothing happens. It's happened on two different windows 10 computers.

 

It's not a conventional way, but Ableton can be "decompressed" without installation process and launched as portable app.
I did this way and it works at least for version 10, 11, 12.
Then you can delete you old folder.

There is a thread somewhere here in this forum discussing this matter.

In case you can't find it, I'll try to reconstruct the procedure here.

 

That would be amazing. I did a cursory look for "ableton portable" and couldn't find anything.

 

Found.
The last section is probably what you are looking for.
Unpack Ableton