I'm developing a simple win32 tool. I'd the tool to be easily uninstalled by the user so I've added a subkey to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
called MyTool and added all the necessary keys such as: DisplayName,UninstallString,DisplayVersion,DisplayIcon
So far so good. I can see that during the install process of my tool, the new subkey was added and everything is as expected.
Problem
When I come to uninstall my tool and press uninstall I get the following error:
You do not have sufficient access to uninstall MyTool. Please contact your system administrator
Notes
My process is 32 bit. However, Wow6432Node related topic is irrelevant since I've encounter this issue both in 32 & 64 bit systems.
Question
Did I do something wrong with the way I've added the registry subkey?
This is the kind of time-wasting bugs that are so stupid.
The issue was, believe it or not, the path separator used in key's value: UninstallString.
Generating error
"C:/Program Files (x86)/MyTool/my_tool.exe" /uninstall"
Working
"C:\Program Files (x86)\MyTool\my_tool.exe" /uninstall
Regardless of whether or not it is my fault as a developer, why would windows error out in this case?
Related
I have been able to successfully install a simple program using an Installer Project on Visual Studio Community 2017. However, I can't find out how to create a fully working deployable uninstaller for an end user.
The Installer Project was set up to only create an Application Folder (in C:\Program Files...) with the Program .exe, and nothing else. This it does successfully. I would like an installer because later I plan to make some registry keys upon installation.
To test uninstallation, I have run the original .exe file built by the Installer Project with the "Uninstall" option. This removes the Application Folder but does not remove the program from the Add/remove programs list in Windows - Leading me to believe there are other registry entries that have not been removed.
I have tried to uninstall purely from the Add/remove programs list, but then I get an error:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\msiexec.exe
"Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item."
In Visual Studio, I can click "Uninstall" from the Installer Project right-click menu which does successfully remove both the Application Folder and the Add/Remove Programs Item, but this is not a deployable solution.
Notes:
OS: Windows 10
Using Visual Studio 2017 Community
Looking at the application Folder, there is neither an install nor uninstall .exe file in it. The Installer Project .exe is only in the original build location, and I cannot find how to get a copy in the Application Folder (not sure if a copy there would work).
I have tried configuring the Installer Project as x86 and x64 with no change.
I have tried using both Debug and Release build configurations with no change.
From looking around, WiX seems to have more features and flexibility, but I haven't yet dug into that. Is there an easier solution?
Has this issue occurred to anyone else? My hopes were that Installer Projects were the simple way to learn and handle installation.
Looks like I jumped to conclusions in the comment above, however I think I found the issue: I cannot uninstall the program from the Windows Apps & Features window in System Settings, but uninstalling from Control Panel\Programs\Programs and Features works fine.
When typing in "Remove" using the windows start button, the default item that comes up is "Add or Remove Programs" in System settings (This looks like a Windows 10 thing). When you click that, it forwards you to the "Apps & features window. I am now learning that for some reason this has different functionality than the control panel window. Or maybe it has lower permissions, although I am the admin and only user of this computer...
Because it can be uninstalled from Control Panel, I think this would be the preferred solution. My assumptions about the other window in system settings was my real issue. I just wish the Apps & features window aligned its functionality/permissions with control panel.
I also learned that uninstall is successful when I run msiexec.ex /I{PACKAGEID} in cmd. Not sure how relevant this is, but documenting here.
Installs and uninstalls are transactional, they either work completely or roll back completely. If you do an uninstall but the entry remains in Add/Remove Programs then it's likely that the uninstall did not in fact work.
When you do the install, if it has a UAC elevation dialog then the install is running with elevation and installing files/registry entries to locations prohibited to limited users. Removing files from those locations also requires elevation. You haven't said exactly how your uninstall works, but most likely it requires elevation to succeed, and your program isn't running elevated. If your program uninstalls silently the uninstall will fail silently, so it's possible that your program isn't actually checking that the uninstall worked.
I'd also guess that your Visual Studio session may be running elevated so uninstall from there works fine.
Apart from privileges, an uninstall from a running installed program tends not to work very well because the uninstall process cannot remove your running program or its folder because it's in use. So while you could get it to work (with elevation) you might find that your program and its folder are left behind until the next reboot. If people really want to do this, one of the strategies is to copy an uninstall program to the temp folder and fire it off asynchronously, so everything can be removed.
Uninstalls from Add/Remove Programs&Features generally work fine. Without some context that error message doesn't mean much. It's not a message that comes out of Windows Installer, so it's perhaps coming out of a custom action. Otherwise it may be an issue specific to the test machine.
There is never an uninstall exe in a Windows Installer setup. When you remove a product the system just calls the Windows API to remove the product. Windows Installer is part of the Windows OS with API support for everything that needs doing. Only non-MSI setups require an install and uninstall exe to do anything.
None of these issues seem to be related to your choice of tool. They all create MSI files and if an MSI design is not optimal it doesn't matter what tool you use. There's nothing wrong with WiX, but to install literally a few files it's overkill compared to Visual Studio.
Gosh, this is so weird, I don't know what to say. The short version is that I have a simulator app which I spawn from my application when the user asks me to. It recently stopped working, though I can run the simulator fine from the command line or Start menu. This could be due to moving to VS2010 or Windows 7 or something I didn't notice reviewing source control diffs.
I have a second simulator which I try to spawn in the same fashion and it works fine.
By default, I'm using Qt3's QProcess wrapper around CreateProcess for this purpose, but I get the same behavior using system, my own CreateProcess, and ShellExecute.
ShellExecute of a cmd.exe "/c application params" does provide me with some more information however. I get the dialog
"The program can't start because MSVCR80.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem."
Inconveniently, both the parent application and the second simulator use MSVCR80.dll.
Upon copying MSVC*80.dll from g:\windows\winsxs\x86_microsoft.vc80.crt_1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b_8.0.50727.4927_none_d08a205e442db5b5 to the same directory as my executable, the error message changes to
"Runtime Error!
Program: g:\path\to\app.exe
R6034
An application has made an attempt to load the C runtime library incorrectly.
Please contact the application's support team for more information.
Followed by
The application was unable to start correctly (0xc0000142). Click OK to close the application.
And, once again, the application runs fine from the command line with those dlls in place.
Update:
I suspected perhaps it was environment related, so changed my ShellExecute mechanism to do cmd /c set && app params. I set up a cmd.exe with those same params and my app is now crashing similarly. Will update when I figure out why :)
It is MATLAB's component runtime tool that is modifying my process's PATH variable to bad effect. It is prepending its own dir full of dll's and wreaking havoc.
A foolish tool I was using did a setenv on PATH, prepending a directory it wanted for dynamically loading some dlls, but which messed up my application later. I ended up using GetEnvironmentStrings as shown in the last example here, erasing the first entry in the PATH env var, and sending the new (original) environment to QProcess, which wraps CreateProcessA.
You need to install the CRT
This may work - if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces :-)
Try installing VC++ redistributable from here - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=A5C84275-3B97-4AB7-A40D-3802B2AF5FC2&displaylang=en.
Remember to backup your system, create a restore point etc. before installing stuff.
Another idea -try reinstalling the failing appliacation itself. It may come with its own copy of VC++ redistributables, and reinstalling might help. Esp. trying to reinstall it using Windows 7's compability mode (perhaps go back to Vista or XP compatibility) might be even more effective.
To reiterate - you'll have to try, and I've no real idea if either of the above ideas will do you good, or even be sure to do no harm. That said, if I were faced with a similar problem, these are the steps I'd try. HTH!
My Windows XP workstation at the office had several old versions of the Java JDK installed on it. Today I decided to install the newest Java JDK and uninstall the older ones. BIG MISTAKE APPARENTLY!
I don't understand why, but XP seems to think that one of the removed JDK installations is the one that it wants to use. Not sure if it is relevant, but it was JDK 1.6.0_13. I uninstalled it earlier using the XP "Add or Remove Programs" from the Control Panel. The JDK folder is gone (as one would expect) but apparently not forgotten. Here are the symptoms:
Eclipse will no longer start up and use the new JDK that I installed. Eclipse acts as if there is no JDK available on the system.
When I type java -version at a Command Prompt I get the following response:
Error: could not open `C:\jdk1.6.0_13\jre\lib\i386\jvm.cfg'
(Gee thanks. I never would have guessed that the uninstalled JDK could not be found...)
When searching around on the machine I found a system service named "Java Quick Starter" that is pointing to the removed JDK directory.
Now I know what some of you are probably thinking. He has a JAVA_HOME system variable pointing to the old location and/or has the old location in his PATH system variable. Not the case! There are no system variables that reference this old JDK and neither does my PATH. In fact, I have already defined a new JAVA_HOME for the new JDK that I installed this morning and added it to the system PATH. I was sure that would at least give me success from the Command Prompt, but no luck.
And in case you're wondering if I have rebooted after the install/uninstall/system variable changes, yes I have.
QUESTION
Does anyone know what I did wrong here? How do I purge these references to the uninstalled JDK from my system so it can start using the newly installed one?
EDIT 1
I checked the registry as duffymo suggested. There was some stuff under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/JavaSoft that did not look right. An entry still existed for the 1.6.0_13 JDK that I had deleted, and a number of the newer JDK installs had entries here with their JavaHome attribute set to the path for the old 1.6.0_13 JDK for some inexplicable reason!
I uninstalled all of the JDKs on the machine, but still there is a remnant of the old 1.6.0_13 JDK in this registry section.
Also, a 1.6.0_21 JRE is still listed in the Add and Remove Programs list that gives an error if I try to uninstall it. That one is also shown in the registry and has a registry "JavaHome" key with a value that points to the no-longer-existing JDK 1.6.0_13.
Check the registry to see if something is hanging around there to point to the old JRE.
Look at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/JavaSoft. You'll see Java Development Kit and Java Runtime Environment there. See what they say.
Now that you've found that the registry values are incorrect, I'd recommend either modifying them to point to the correct values OR remove them, uninstall the JDK, and reinstall.
You could also maybe try disabling the service from starting.
Copied from my repost of this quesiton on www.superuser.com:
https://superuser.com/questions/203143/cannot-install-java-jre-on-windows-xp-workstation-possibly-due-to-previous-faile
I tried CCleaner on the registry, but it didn't solve the problem. I was feeling pretty desperate at that point and decided to search the registry with regedt32 for instances of "jdk1.6.0" and delete everything that was obviously garbage. Any registry references to JDK/JRE instances that I knew no longer existed got deleted. Usually this meant deleting the whole key, but there were a few keys where I just had to delete an individual value/data pair. I rebooted after I was done performing meatball surgery on my poor defenceless registry.
DISCLAIMER: I don't recommend that anyone start messing with random keys in their registry as the primary way to solve a problem! This was my last resort before considering the option of re-imaging my workstation and re-installing EVERYTHING.
Having said that, this approach did solve my problem. I was able to install the JRE and then things like Eclipse started working normally once again. I next installed a JDK of the same version without incident.
I've just discovered that regtlib.exe appears to be missing from Windows 7 (and apparently from Vista as well).
I've just installed Windows 7 RC in a VM and I'm attempting to build our existing projects on the new OS. The projects are c/c++ based and I'm using visual studio 2008. In order to build these projects I need to register several tlb files that are referenced within the code base.
Has anyone also encountered this problem? And, has anyone managed to solve this?
Thanks.
Yeah regtlib was removed from vista and up. As far as I know, all it does is call LoadTypeLibEx with the REGKIND_REGISTER flag (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms221249.aspx). Maybe you could write a simple replacement.
Just came across this issue (couldn't add any components to a VB6 project on Win7). This post (Error accessing the system registry in VB 6 IDE) pointed to regtlib (which is missing from Win7). I just
set the VB6 start menu icon to 'Run As Administrator' and it worked fine for adding components and should fix any problems relating to updating the registry as well.
Regards
Ian
Finally got back to trying to build our code base on windows 7. Anyway, I went back to the installer for one of the dependencies that was causing me grief. The error message from the installer wasn't to helpful but it did point to a regasm that was being run from inside the installer.
I ran the regasm command from a cmd prompt and got more information. It appears that you need administrative credentials to perform this task and our current installers don't do the privilege escalation properly.
So, long story short, I got dlls registered and the build appears to be working.
I have an old, old VC++ app that we've ported to VS2005. Our existing users need to get the VC++2005 DLLs, so my app is placing the vcredist_x86.exe on their machines and running it. I check a registry entry under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\SideBySide\Installations\ which is x86_Microsoft.VC80.MFC blah blah 8.0.50727.762 blah blah...
But... it appears that this doesn't exist on Vista. What is the correct entry to check to make sure that the vcredist ran to completion, so that I don't have to run it again?
Thanks!
I never found anything definite on this, although you could look in the winsxs folder in the users windir for the right folders and files.
I've got our app's installer running it quietly when they install, which won't cause any problems if it is already there.
so my app is placing the
vcredist_x86.exe on their machines and
running it.
This is a highly irregular way of doing this.
Usually the side by side packages are automatically added to the dependencies of an installer object under the "detected dependencies"
Keeping it simple: just run the redist setup as part of a batch file that writes some registry value when it's done (so you could check and not run it twice) or write some file to a known location.
true, this way if your uses ran vcredist on their own sometime in the past your first installation would be superfluous, but I guess it can't really hurt and isn't that big of a deal.
Other than that (I realize it ain't pretty) I suspect you'll have to check that every single file that comes in the 2005 redist package is there (wasn't deleted by any chance or damaged), which is pretty much what the redist setup ought to do anyway.