I have a customer who has a support case which someone can't install their software because the GUID is already in use by Dell. They get an error message saying they have to uninstall, because another version of this software is already installed.
Does anyone know of an existing bug about the GUID generating algorithm in Installshield not giving a unique GUID?
I verified that the GUID is the same as a Dell product they mentioned.
This customer has to install this on many workstations. Any suggestions what to do? I thought of generating a transform to change the GUID, but they will have to apply that for updates etc. It’s also too late to change this as the CD is burned and duplicated many times.
InstallShield generates GUIDs through the Windows CoCreateGuid API (this is the same API used by the GUIDGen/Create GUID utility that ships with Visual Studio). It is unlikely for this API to generate duplicate GUIDs, even across multiple machines.
This same issue has been seen at least once before, and appears to be caused by the software in question not generating GUIDs through any normal method provided on Windows.
Unfortunately, the only resolutions are to either remove the offending software package, or change the product code used in your project.
