7 replies to this topic

[mpento]

Hi Folks,

I have been struggling for some time with a fairly large project from an upgrade standpoint. basically, here is my problem:

I have builds of this project which have versions that range from 4.00.0000 to 4.00.0003 just for the purpose of discussion.

Whenever I produce a new "release" type build, I change the product code and bump the version by 1. I have one major upgrade item which is set to remove the previous version completely and install the new version, the table contains the upgrade code which has been shared by each build since the beginning. I would have much rather been able to do a minor upgrade between revisions, but, since this never seems to work reliably (if at all) we decided that it would be better to handle upgrades as major instead of minor.

Now, to the actual problem. When upgrading, the install does all of the things that it should, it uninstalls all of the old version and installs the new one in its place. I can see my CA's running at the right times while I watch (most are command line functions, so I can see them execute ...) and everything seems to go well.

The problem is, once the install is complete, and I double click the application, instead of my application running, an install progress dialog pops up and starts installing stuff! ?? The only thing I can compare it to is when you try and use some feature of MS Office that is not installed and it starts installing that feature "auto-magically".

Although I think this is unacceptable from a functionality standpoint, it would at least be ok if it worked right, but generally, what happens is that it fails to find some file and that leaves my application completely broken.

Does anyone know what causes this behavior and how I could go about stopping this from happening? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Mike

[Stefan Krueger]

Please try the steps described here to diagnose the problem:
Windows Installer launches unexpectedly, for no obvious reason
http://www.msifaq.com/a/1037.htm

[mpento]

Hi Stephan,

Thanks for the speedy reply, it was very helpful.

Unfortunately, I am not exactly sure what this means. I have found in the Application event viewer the component that is having a problem and making the repair operation start, but, I am not sure what I am suppposed to do to fix the problem.

It tells me that there component does not exist, I know it is being installed (I think so, anyways) so, I don't know, is there something simple here that I am not understanding?

Again, I appreciate the assistance,
Mike

[Stefan Krueger]

A verbose log might tell you what exactly is going on. Did you double check that the key path (file, registry) of the component is installed and accessible for the currently logged on user?

[mpento]

Hi Stefan and Happy New Year,

I generated a verbose log way back to try and troubleshoot this problem, I didnt have any luck though.

I am looking into a few things that I have found in researching this problem over the weekend though. If they solve the problem, I will post what I found here.

Thanks,
Mike

[mpento]

Hi Stefan,

I fear that I am going to sound completely stupid here, but, I am not exactly sure what you mean by this:

[Stefan Krueger]

Well, you know which component trigegrs the auto-repair. You know which file is the key file of this component.
Now after you installed your upgrade, but be fore you launch the application, verify that the file actually exists in the specified location. E.g. go to the directory with Explorer, try to open the file (to make sure it's not a permission problem). Look at the file version and compare it to the version information in the File table of the msi file (the new version).
If the file is there and the version is correct, then no auto repair should be triggered. Of course I'm assuming that you did follow all component rules, in particular the ComponentId GUID hasn't changed between versions, and the same file was key file of that component in the old version, too.

[Glytzhkof]

I am not sure if this has already been covered in this dicussion, but I find that two cases can cause self repair and be difficult to discover:

The first issue: A file is installed to another users profile and it is set to be the keyfile:
C:\Documents and settings\user1\file.txt

user2 may not have access to that file (since it is in the other users profile) and a self repair could result. It will generally not succeed though since the user does not have access to the other user's folder (unless the setup runs elevated).

The second issue: A temporary file has been set to be keypath. If the file is a temporary file it will eventually get deleted. This can cause a lot of mysterious self repair.

I am kind of shooting from the hip here, I hope I am answering the question. There are a few other issues as well, but please check the above first.