Hello-
I have a basic msi project which appends to the PATH environment variable on Win7. After installing my software, the system becomes unusable. For example, I lose many icons for my shortcuts. I can't execute anything from a RUN dialog that exists in c:\windows. The behavior has been previously diagnosed by us as a corrupt PATH variable (or at least a variable that is now unknown to the running processes).
Usually a log off or reboot fixes this behavior. In 10% of the cases, this is not fixed and there is no recovery short of restoring the PATH variable from a backup.
This only happens on systems when installs are run that modify an already very long PATH variable. I talked to my software architect and she mentioned that all it would take is some helper dll to have a small limit in it to get in this state. My question is, does anyone know how the Environment Table writes changes to a variable?
Is there a manual way to write an environment variable? Would it be acceptable to write the PATH variable in Installscript?