3 replies to this topic

[GuySmiley]

Hi all..

I am experiencing a very peculiar, yet serious, couple of errors when running my ISWI-made installer on a Windows 2003 Server box with terminal services.

When I double-click setup.exe it pops up a dialog with one "Next >" button with the instructions "After installation, please click Next.". If you do click next, another dialog with only a "Finish" button appears. This one has the caption:
"When the installation has finished (successfully or not), please click the Finish button or the Cancel button. DO NOT CLICK THE BUTTONS BEFORE THE INSTALLATION HAS ENDED!"

.. this is obviously unsightly and highly annoying.. very curious too because it doesn't display on WinNT, 2K or XP, and also only appears if terminal services has been installed on the 2003 box (I am running the install through VNC when I see this).

there is more though.. when I run the install as a major upgrade, it fails to write some necessary registry entries under HKEY_CURRENT_USER. In the log it indicates under WriteRegistryValues that they have been written, but following the installation they are not present. I even added a custom action to terminate the install immediately after InstallFinalize in case something else was deleting them, but they are still not present after it dies even though the log indicates they were just written..

again, both of these errors only occur if terminal services has been installed and everything works fine otherwise.

these errors are causing me no small amount of grief, and I have no idea how to go about getting around them.. does anyone know what might be causing this behaviour?

thanks for any help,
gs.

[Stefan Krueger]

I believe in order to install software on a terminal server you must switch it to "install" mode (or however it is called). I guess that's what these dialogs do.

[Zweitze]

As Stefan stated, the dialog is standard behavior of Terminal Services, in Windows 2000 Server or Windows 2003 Server. See http://www.microsoft...s_app_h_020.htm

You can prevent this dialog by opening a command prompt first, and issuing the following command:
CHANGE USER /INSTALL
After Setup, and other configuration options, issue the following command:
CHANGE USER /EXECUTE

This method is mandatory on Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition.

[GuySmiley]

great thanks!.. this is indeed the source of those popups.

Unfortunately resolving this didn't fix the second problem where the user registry is not written (even though the log indicates that it was).. I believe that terminal services does something special with the user registry during a session, like maintaining a session-specific copy, which I think might be the reason for this behaviour, but I'm still not sure what it is.

Also I think that on Win2003, every session (including desktop sessions) are treated like TS sessions if TS has been installed, so I am always seeing this issue on 2003, but only if TS is present..

anyways, thanks again for your help.. if I find out anything more about this second issue I'll post it.

gs.