Update, Stein Åsmul: Injecting this newer list of cleanup approaches. Find your package in C:\Windows\Installer, where Windows keeps copies of installed MSI packages. The names are generated randomly, so you’ll have to look at the creation dates of the files. Open the MSI file with Orca. (Unfortunately there is no simple download for the orca … Read more
We also encountered this problem where lower-versioned DLLs were not getting reinstalled on a major upgrade. I thought it was strange that the installer would decide which files to install based on the versioning of existing files, then completely uninstall everything, but still only install what what files had been determined to install before uninstalling … Read more
First of all, I would recommend you using PermissionEx instead. It is a standard WiX extension and it has one really huge advantage over Permission – it doesn’t overwrite, but modifies ACLs. And by default, it applies permissions to the folder and all its descendant files and folders, so you don’t have to specify anything … Read more
An MSI is a Windows Installer database. Windows Installer (a service installed with Windows) uses this to install software on your system (i.e. copy files, set registry values, etc…). A setup.exe may either be a bootstrapper or a non-msi installer. A non-msi installer will extract the installation resources from itself and manage their installation directly. … Read more
Deployment: Note that it is not always possible to run a setup.exe silently with full control of parameters and with reliable silent running. It depends on how the installer was designed. In these cases I normally resort to repackaging – some more detail below on this. Some general tips for dealing with deployment: Software Library … Read more
Faulty Configuration: This line would never run – regardless of silent or interactive mode: <Custom Action=”SilentExecExample” After=”TheActionYouWantItAfter”/> The After attribute must specify a valid StandardAction or CustomAction name. Silent Mode Failure: The line below will fail in silent mode because you run it after InstallFinalize. In this case it will not run with elevation (unless … Read more
Similar Answer: How to Explicitly Remove dll During Majorupgrade Using Wix Toolset Major Upgrade Downgrade: In order to overwrite binaries with higher version numbers on major upgrades there are a couple of preferred options: The preferred approach would be to use a companion file (third party files). Or if you can: compile a new binary … Read more
Similar Answer: File of a new component isn’t installed because there was an old component with the same file Companion Files: How to use Companion Files in WiX – just a snippet (after debugging it was discovered that OP had an issue of needing to downgrade files instead of a problem with number of version … Read more
The latest supported Visual C++ downloads Runtime Detection Approaches I can find a few ways to detect the presence of the Visual C++ Runtime. Registry Keys used by the VCRedist installer (see section below) Keys mentioned in my original answer – grabbed from this old answer File Presence & Version Check Check for presence of … Read more
I think I found the answer. By using Popen with close_fds = True I was able to start up a process that was independent and without handles to the parent. For docs look here and search for close_fds. Or, on Windows, if close_fds is true then no handles will be inherited by the child process. … Read more