I have an installscript MSI project that is working without issue on every machine I've tested except for one.
On that machine the following warning occurs :
Warning 1909. Could not create shortcut MyShortcut.lnk. Verify that the destination folder exists and that you can access it.
This following error ensues :
Error 2902. Operation ixoShortcutPropertyCreate called out of sequence.
I don't believe this is actually being called out of sequence as the desktop icon creation is successfully executed immediately before this failure occurs.
I have tried changing the permissions on the folder, and the parent folder, to no avail. I also see nothing wrong with the shortcut entries themselves, they are pretty much set to the default.
The machine in question has Win 10 installed on it.
Anyway, any help on this would be greatly appreciated as I would love to ensure that this installs cleanly and successfully whenever possible.
It does not create all the shortcuts. It successfully creates the desktop shortcut, then fails to create the appropriate folder and shortcut for the start menu -> programs shortcut.
Verify that the CreateShortcuts action in the installation execute sequence (in the Sequences view) is sequenced after both the RemoveShortcuts and InstallFiles standard actions. This is required as indicated in the Windows Installer documentation for the CreateShortcuts action.
If the CreateShortcuts action is sequenced correctly, run full MSI validation (Build menu -> Validation -> Full MSI Validation Suite) on your built MSI to ensure the MSI validates correctly. Any errors (that are not ICE43 or ICE57) should be looked at, and corrected if necessary, to ensure they are not interfering with the expectations of the Windows Installer engine.
Thanks for the info and suggestions, I'll give that a try. Out of curiosity, if it were really out of sequence wouldn't it fail every time we tried to run the installation rather than on random machines?
An issue with the MSI package should cause consistent behavior across all machines. Running validation will verify that, at the very least, the MSI package contains valid data.
A Google search of 'ixoShortcutPropertyCreate' turned up information indicating this is a permissions problem on the folder MSI is trying to create the shortcut in. The only solutions that seem to resolve the behavior are correcting the permissions on the folders in question.
Based on this, what folders did you change permissions on? Since InstallScript MSI installations are always per-machine, the Public user's Desktop folder would be where permissions need to be verified and corrected.
If the permissions appear to be correct, you may try creating a test project (Basic MSI) that installs a shortcut to the desktop. If this succeeds on the problem machine, are there any differences remaining with the shortcuts, such as the shortcut name, the target, shortcut properties, etc. Eliminate as many differences as possible to try reproducing this behavior with the test project. If any particular setting triggered the error, then that would be the next thing to look at on the machine in question.
There's other tools you could use to monitor the installation, such as Process Monitor from sysinternals.com, for indications of what on that machine is causing the error.
