Please Help: Unidentified Publisher UAC prompt during install on Vista
Hi,
I have an single exe installer which I've built using InstallShield 2008 and signed with a code signing certificate from Comodo using the integrated code signing features of InstallShield 2008 on a WinXp PC with IE7.
During the build process the log indicates that the signing of the both the msi file and exe were successful.
When I try to run this installer under Vista I get a UAC prompt during the install for the msi file which has been extracted to a temporary location by the single exe which says unidentified publisher. If you click on details it shows the location of the msi file, unidentified publisher and the code signing details of the msi file. Eg: Product Name and Company Name etc.
If you navigate to the temporary location of the msi file and and look at the digital signature of the msi file it appears to be appropriately signed.
I believe the issue relates to how InstallShield signs the code but as I'm new to code signing I can't be certain.
If you try to run the installed application as an administrator the UAC prompt is as expected (eg doesn't show unidentified publisher), so that would infer the certificate itself is ok as the same certificate was used to sign the application before building the installer.
Any assistance on how I can resolve this issue would be appreciated.
I'm not familiar with Comodo, so pardon me if I'm asking and restating something which should be obvious. Various certificates which are equivalent to test certificates will show validly signed files in explorer, but will generally show up as untrusted or unknown in programs which use the certificates to verify identity. If you click on the Details button in Explorer's Digital Signatures tab, does it say something akin to "The certification path terminates with the test root which is not trusted with the current policy settings," or does the certificate show up as trusted?
I am having this same issue. I am testing two setups on a Vista Guest account. One requires admin the other invoker. When started both apps ask for permission but the admin level install shows the Unidentified Publisher message. The invoker level install shows our company name just fine. Our key came from VeriSign. Any suggestions as to where to look next?
As I was pushed for time I gave up trying to resolve the issue and decided to just release the MSI version of the installer rather than the Setup.exe version.
My testing at the time showed that if I copied the MSI file which was extracted to a temporary directory to another location then ran it it would show the correct UAC prompt, but if ran from where it was extracted it would show the incorrect UAC prompt.
I recently discovered that this issue appears to be related to a Vista UAC bug with respect to files which are stored in temporary folders etc.
I found a reference to an article on a another forum (can't remember where) which documented examples of Vista showing the incorrect UAC prompt purely based on where the executable was saved.
