We are packaging an application using MSI build Engine through InstallShield 2010.
The installation/re-installation of the application is version dependent. If a PC already has the application installed a user can only install a version higher than the installed one otherwise it does not proceed. The package contains a number of exe, dll, ocx and vbs files.
Now when we install the package on a clean PC where this application has not been installed before it works perfectly. The problem arises when we try to install in a PC where a lower (earlier) version of the application already exists. The installation completes without any warning or error but it silently fails to copy a random number of files (mostly dll and exe). If we repair the installation from add/remove programs all the files are reinstalled correctly. This means the package actually contains all the key files but does not copy them to the destination correctly sometimes. We double checked that files get dropped are not marked as ‘shared’.
The issue is intermittent. We repackaged it multiple times and observed different outcomes. Even though the conditions and the parameter remained same and some of the packages installs everything perfectly but some others packages fail to copy a number of key files to the installation. We could not see any pattern on the files being dropped. We inspected the install log and there is no warning or anything as such but we can see from the log that a number of files are missing from the list of the files being copied over.
We are still in a development stage of the application and therefore, we often have to add/delete items and repackage. However, under the current circumstance the unreliability of the packaging became an issue.
We have tried different things and now ran out of ideas. If a single file had been missing constantly we could have thought differently but we are failing to see any pattern in here. We would really appreciate if you can point us in any direction or what could possibly be triggering this instability. Please let me know if you need any further information.
There are a couple tools you can use to try to track this sort of thing down. One is the Upgrade Validation Wizard, under the Build > Validate menu. This analyzes your pair of packages for potential problems during an upgrade. The other is a verbose MSI log of the installation of the upgrade package on the machine that had the earlier package. It should have lines that describe why various components or files are not being installed.
