Installer hangs while creating shortcut

[sshelley]

It appears that IA 2009 is having intermittent problems with a GIF image(s) being used for a shortcut (Windows XP). The installer worked fine earlier, but the application content changed a bit, rebuilt the installer, and am now encountering the problem. The installer appears to hang while creating the .lnk file. Console output shows:

Image still not fully loaded: width < 0

which repeats continuously. If the GIF's are removed and the installation kit rebuilt, install works fine (but of course with wrong shortcut icon).

Advice and/or workarounds appreciated. GIF's attached, if interested.

[krishnanrp]

Hi

This is actually a known bug with IA2009. But there are workarounds for it.

As per IA Support,

There is a bug in InstallAnywhere where having these files in the speed folder action causes the builder to mess up and build the images into the archive incorrectly. You just need to move the image files and ico file out of the speed folder action and add them normally to the project (using Add files). Do this for every create shortcut action that uses a custom image and the image belongs to a folder being installed by the install speed folder action.

With Regards
R P Krishnan

[sshelley]

Thanks!

I was just about to write a reply indicating that the solution didn't seem to help, but then discovered that not only do you need to break the GIF files out from the SpeedFolder action, you need to install them BEFORE the SpeedFolder action (which installs the target for the shortcuts). At least for the moment, that seems to work.

Thanks again,
Steve

[brieck]

Same problem here but I'm not installing the .gif file at all. I'm just picking it in the create shortcut action. You guys are installing the .gif file?

The target of the shortcut is not in a speed folder either. I tried moving the $USER_SHORTCUTS$ folder to the top of the list in the INSTALL tab in the designer but then I get no shortcuts at all - I assume this is because the targets aren't on the disk yet at that point.

Thanks!

Oh, as an aside I really wish that the bug re: the .ico that IA generates not including a 16x16 size image even if one is selected would get fixed.

[jerome_IA]

I encountered this issue few month ago when I upgraded to IA 2009.

Install was looping with same error: Image still not fully loaded: width < 0

I opened an incident to acresso support and finally got the following answer to be used as a workaround:
==============================
Functionality has been added to IA it remove duplicate files, and since these are identical files, the second is being filtered from the build. You can work around this by specifying the same file with the same name for both of your shortcuts.
==============================

In fact, I was using 2 gif files while one was the copy of the other. So I got two identical files with different names.

Workaround is to edit one of those files and save it again so that files are not "binary" identical but images are the same.

Hope it will help

[brieck]

In my case the problem was that the .gif file I was using for the shortcut was also being installed for use by our product, although not in a speed folder. My shortcuts did indeed use the same file.

I did you trick to make the file different from a binary point of view and the problem is worked around. Thanks for the info!

Unfortunate that we know have to maintain 2 different image files for the same image though.