Knowledge base article Q112941 says that in some cases, environment variables with \u in them can be misinterpreted as a (malformed) UTF-8 escape sequence.
This can also occur when using the "Extract to File" plugin to extract to the $INSTALLER_TEMP_DIR$, which you might do if you need a third-party jar file to run custom rules in the pre-install phase.
On Windows Vista the files extracted are mentioned in the uninstaller's properties file like:
this solution doesnt work for me. Neither does the solution to unset the PS1 env vars.
I am trying to the run my uninstaller on Windows (built using IA2010). I get this error only on uninstaller launch. Im stuck in my testing because i cant uninstall my application.
During maintenance mode [using Add Features option], if I used the action "Output debug info to file" and set the destination to be the IA file "installvariables.properties", it would include some paths that contained "/uninstaller.jar". My reason for doing this was to update the value of some vars that needed to be displayed everytime I ran it in Add Features mode. So the next time the uninstaller was run, it read this file with the wrong encoding and misinterpreted the "/u" as part of something in UTF.
In simple terms, its like sometimes when your double quotes turn up as some random chars like &:, So the way IA writes to installvariables.properties and the way it reads it back during execution is different. 😞
