8 replies to this topic

[tomknight]

This is driving me (and the installtion engineers! mad.....

On some Win2k PCs, Windows Installer starts as soon as one logs into the PC, flashiung up a couple of progress bars and then going away. When one of a variety of apps (not just from my company) is started, Installer starts again, and asks for the media for one of our products. It won't accept the .msi from the CD, or the cached msi file, or anything....

Looking in the Event log (application), I see the following:

Detection of product '{5D1C1FD5-83DA-11D4-8FD3-00600827961D}', feature 'Clients', component '{A8A1495F-36E5-11D2-B15A-00C04F990B2B}' failed

And another one just above, same product, different component : D4269787-9AC6-11D4-AC0D-00600827961D

(The second component looks rather like the product at the end, but it's what the engineer had written down...)

This is a very bad affair.
Not only does our company's product not work properly, but other products have oddities involved with them.

Oh, of course, as an installation's in progress, one can't log out normally, but end up having to use alt-ctrl-del to get the security dialogue and log out from there.

Any ideas??

Cheers,

Tom.

[tomknight]

Hey, I didn't put that smiley in the first line, honest!

[tomknight]

Hey, I didn't put that smiley in the first line, what's it doing there?

[omwof]

I have had this behaviour before in the past when my directory table has been broken.

Also look at the feature in question and see if you have any run at source components present. If you do place them in a seperate feature maybe? and then disble any advertising, etc

Finally are you installing third party dll's or the like as components, rather than merge modules. If so check out for ready made merge modules.

Basically there are many causes for this to happen, and many ways for it occur.

[tomknight]

Cheers for those ideas.

I should have added that this only happens on about 1-2% of PCs (that I know of). Even so, I'll check out the directory table.

I certainly have advertiseing disabled, and I don't use run from source. I _do_ use third party dlls, but there weren't any ready made merge modules available (Virtual Print Engine, List and Labels), so I made my own.

Any other ideas, anyone?

Tom.

[rgaetz]

This really fits my scenario as well.  When my vb app is launched and a certain window is opened, Windows Installer requests the Office 2000 CD.  What gets installed is MSQuery.  I've checked to see if there are any dlls/ocx's shared with my app, and there is one.  Vsflex3.ocx is installed with MSQuery and with my app.  The default Office Install advertises MSQuery to install on 1st Use.  And so (I think)when my app initializes Vsflex3.ocx, Windows installer wakes up and asks for the installer for the package that it knows uses the component in question.  

If I have grasped this sequence properly then this would seem to be a design issue with the MSI concept.  If app A advertises a component, then app B installs it; when app B invokes the component, Installer auto-installs app A.  Is that the way its supposed to work?

Has anyone else run into this?  For a while I thought that manually unregistering and then re-registering the Vsflex3 component would resolve it, but the problem has crept back.

Thanks in advance
Ron

[hambone]

i believe this might be related to having a component exist in the environment that clashes with another component of a different version.  

msi uses the source resiliency to repair what it figures to be a corrupted install ( possibly the Vsflex3.ocx file that is expected is the wrong version and because msi knows where to get the right one it does and then installs it ).  unfortunately this in turn breaks the other application ( which auto-detects a problem and auto-repairs when it is run and which then breaks the first
application ).

in cases like this it is desirable to have a conflict analyzer to review you msi products in search of any common components that have different component GUIDs.  barring this you could export all of the component GUIDs from your apps and group and sort them in an effort to find conflicting components ( the same component with different GUIDs, different components .with the same GUID,... )

i think you will find that the 'smiley face' is an emoticon placed there by the substitution of a punctuation mark... unlike )

[Stefan Krueger]

Remove the check mark next to "Do you wish to enable emoticons for this post?" when you post to avoid automatic conversion of punctuation to smileys

[venutoa]

I got this same problem also with Win2k using MS installer 1.11.  Any other solutions besides checking all of the GUIDs...  )  From my readings people say that MSI is laden with bugs...