Basic MSI - Stop Setup if UAC Disabled for Standard User
QA reported that if a standard user tries to launch Setup.exe to install prerequisites that the Setup prerequisite dialog comes up and starts to flash infinitely. I suspect that it is trying to launch the UAC but it is not able to since the user has disabled it.
We recently encountered and fixed this case, actually. If you can accept an unofficial hotfix (I believe the fix has gone through QA, but it's planned for a different distribution method at some later date), you can back up and replace the setupPreReq.exe in your Redist\Language Independent\i386 folder with the one in the attached zip.
To clarify potential expectations, the new behavior will still potentially be an infinite loop, but it will now wait for the user to click Install before continuing the next iteration. There is unfortunately no way to acquire administrative privileges in this scenario, and I personally consider the behavior a bug in Vista, as similar code would potentially acquire the privileges on XP where there is no UAC.
Just to let you know that I performed a similar test using the Visual Studio Bootstrapper and it performed exactly as I would expect. The prerequisite editor first tested that the user has administrative priviledges and if it cannot confirm this then it errors out gracefully.
For this release we have chosen to remove the flag "Require Administrative Privileges" from the PRQ file as this causes the bad behavior. When the user clicks to Install the prerequisite (in this case MS Visual Studio 2005 Redist) the redistributable MSI package errors out gracefully and the infinite loop is prevented ... well to the same extent as you indicate - the user is given a prompt to try again or cancel. At least the user can exit the setup without having to reboot the machine 😄
You may want to look at the Visual Studio prerequisite design and see if you can replicate their behavior.
