MS Office 97

[CChong]

Hi Everyone

I've been trying for the past week to create a .msi of a total installation of MS Office 97.

Unfortunately I keep running into the same problem:

When the package is installed, everything works ok, but when i afterwards create a new user and log in as him, the trouble starts. Either the installation of the entire package repeates itself whenever the user open WinWord, or the user can use winword, but clicking directly on a .doc fil (as opposed to starting winword, and selecting file -> open), results in the installation of the package.

I have created my packages on a Clean VMWare Windows 2000 machine - I have tried both "Installation monitoring" and "SnapShot" - nothing works.


Any suggestions would be appreciated.

-
Jakob Bindslet, Denmark

[AdamCurry]

Hello Jakob,

The package will try to install or repair itself if a key file or keypath is missing. In this case there must be something installed to a per-user location. You can check the Windows 2000 event log to find out which component is being repaired. Go to the Control Panel |Administrative Tools|Event Viewer. Open the Application log. You should see one or more entries with MsiInstaller as the source. Look through these entries and one should indicate that a specific component was being repaired. There will be a component GUID listed. You can then take note of this GUID and search for it in the component table via the direct editor in Developer for your project. This will provide you with the component name. Then, analyze the structure of the compont via the components view.

[dynamox]

Adam, what can be done to force installation on per machine basis? So that no matter if new user loges in, the app does not have to go through self-healing process


Thanks

[AdamCurry]

The keyfiles and keypaths set off the self-repair and unsetting these will prevent the installer from trying to repair them when another user logs on, of course the next user to log on will not have access to those files and registry keys.

Another option is to install the data to a per-machine location such as HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE so that all users can access them.