UpdateService 3.0 is pretty much broken?

[akarnik]

hi all,

just upgraded to Installshield X and UpdateService 3.x (whatever the latest is). built my project and installed it on a test machine as a user with admin rights. Installs fine, the new update manager works fine.

now, i log on to the same machine as a user without admin rights. As soon as the user logs in, windows installer starts up the installer for my program and then aborts because of the "admin rights" check.

now why the heck is the installer starting up for each user? i have installed the software as a per machine install with ALLUSERS=1.

so, i look in the event viewer and i see this error :
=====================================
Detection of product '{CE6D2E82-9749-4608-A842-914F7CCF458C}', feature 'MicrosoftRedistributables', component '{5CC2D105-DDDD-4EC4-8B74-750194E57B99}' failed. The resource 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\InstallShield\UpdateService\' does not exist.
=====================================

why is the update service trying to install something automatically for this non-admin user? also, the key it is looking for is UpdateService, one word. There already is a key in the same location "Update Service" with a space in between.


this is ridiculous. what am i supposed to tell users? never log on to your machine with an account which doesnt have admin rights? well, that rules out 99% of my customers.


Installshield tech support tells me that this is a known issue. really!? So they actually released a product by testing it only for admin users? not that these problems are new to them...over a year or more ago, i had reported similar problems with the installshield update service which didnt work for non-admin users. gave errors while writing to the "Database" dir under the updateservice dir in program files. So they repeated the same mistake again.

so as it stands now, i have no choice but to drop update service, ask for my money back, and write something better myself.

[russellperry]

I'm having the same problem. On XP, installed my product for "all users", but when a user logs on under a different profile, admin or not, the repair mode fires up.

Help.

Dave

[akarnik]

ok, here's the solution i got from Installshield Tech Support.

Open the ISUS.msm merge module from the "Objects" dir in your Installshield installation, directly in Installshield X.
Now locate the component "DummyComp" and delete it. It is this component which causes this problem.

i tested it and this fix works.

please call tech support and complain about this. they shouldnt be releasing software with such obvious lack of testing. and if they have known about it, why cant they publish an update to either the update service, or installshield X which fixes this problem. or do they think that the world logs on with admin rights?

[russellperry]

That's great...I had pretty much come to the same conclusion myself, because the offending component was named "dummycomp" related to a dir called "test" something. It looks like some testing "code" slipped through into production.

Good to know...will implement shortly and report back.

[CChong]

I tried deleting the 'DummyCorp' component, but the installation now fails when the update service runs and starts repair mode.

I have tried altering the install condition to prevent it from being installed, but as the program is already installed it doesn't help.

Also I have had no luch actually removing the update service icon with the fix suggested by IS technical support.

Why oh why is there not a patched version yet? You can only imagine the pain of being called 10 times a day because of these issues by confused customers. Its not so bad when it is a mistake made internally.

[akarnik]

yes...i do still have the same problem. Tech Support says that Development is aware of it...when they intend to do a fix for this, who knows. i cant believe it takes so long to fix something like this.