Prerequisites do not work on Windows 2000

[MKubala]

I created a lot of prerequisites that check the operating system first. I have prerequisites from Windows 2000, XP, and 2003. I have just one installer for all operating systems and on the XP and 2003 systems they work correctly where only the prerequisites meant for those systems show up to be installed. On the Windows 2000 machine however, all prerequisites show up. On top of that when I click to install them, the installer marks each prerequisites Successful without even attempting to install them.

This all worked a couple of months ago using the same ISM file and the same Windows 2000 image. The only thing that has changed is that I added on a lot more prerequisites. The setup.exe file is around 650MB and the Release Wizard is set to DVD 10. I'm not sure what else to check for.

Oh I recently created another thread about issues with the Release Wizard giving me weird behavior. I'm not sure if this is related or not, but I saw this issue here before having problems with the Release Wizard in the other thread.

Thanks.

[joshstechnij]

Is this reproducible with any project on Windows 2000 that uses prerequisites? Also, can you try creating a setup.exe log:
setup.exe /debuglog"C:\PathToLog\LogFile.log"

Please attach the log file.

[MKubala]

I only have one Windows 2000 image to test on. I was getting sporadic behavior when using the same build with the same image. Sometimes it would work without any problems, sometimes it was broken on the first run, and sometimes it would be broken after I rebooted and ran it again. I was using this same build for XP and 2003 and it worked fine every time. I've attached the logfile from one of the times it was broken on the first run. I did some data cleaning on it to remove the network paths and whatnot.

[joshstechnij]

There appear to be a large number of prerequisites included in this setup. The log file indicates that some of them are being launched (for example, the following EXE's are being launched for prerequisites: NDP20-KB947746-X86.exe, NDP1.1sp1-KB947742-X86.exe, IE6.0sp1-KB938464-Windows2000-x86-ENU.exe). Are there any prerequisites in particular that were not installed?

Also, it appears this setup was run silently. Does the behavior change if the setup is run with full UI?

[MKubala]

I'm doing something a little weird with the prerequisites. My entire installer is just prerequisites. There is nothing that is actually installed. I'm using them because it's easy to say "run this executable if it's Windows XP and this registry setting isn't set". I seem to get random behavior no matter what I do. On some instances it works fine and on other's it lists every single prerequisite even though the prerequisite explicitly says that it's meant for another operating system. When I run this exact same installer on XP and 2003, when the prerequisite window comes up it only lists the prerequisites meant for that operating system. On the 2000 machine though, it would sometimes list every single prerequisite regardless of what the operating system it was meant for. On this case it might have listed all of them and only install the ones that were appropriate, but I've seen other instances where it listed all of them and then it would fly through all the prerequisites on a minute or two when it should take 15 mins to go through all of them.

I'm not sure if this is an InstallShield issue or an image issue. How does InstallShield determine what operating system it is running on? Maybe I could check those settings on the image to determine if they are changing and messing up the installer.

[MKubala]

So this issue has come up again except this time it was a windows 2003 machine and it wasn't a VM. My setup.exe has grown to 845MB so maybe that is an issue? This problem only shows very infrequently, but it can happen to the same machine using the same installer. Previous installs will work correctly but every once in a while I get this odd behavior.

[MKubala]

So I had two VMs up running Windows 2000 and one of them was showing this bug so I started comparing the two.

On the buggy one I went to the temp directory under Admin – Local Settings and I found the folder where the PRQ’s are laid down. The ones on the bad image had squares in front of some of the PRQ names and when I pasted those into word it showed this symbol:

྆

Well in Office 2007 it shows as an upside down question mark character. Going to the same directory in the good image, it did not have any of those bad characters in the file name. Anyway I started deleting those characters from the PRQ file names in the bad image and re-ran the installer and it worked. Not sure if I fixed it or if a previous reboot did or something different. Any ideas on what this could mean?

[Christopher_Pai]

This does sound strange. If we could get a test environment that repeatedly demonstrates this problem, and then do another build that only includes one or two prereqs, that would be helpful in identifying the scenarior, cause and/or resolution.

It also might just be that you've out grown InstallShield for this task.

Josh- do you have any further thoughts on this? MKubala is a coworker and I've been asked to look into this.

[joshstechnij]

This behavior was previously seen with the extracted MSI package on Vista machines. A resolution was provided in SP1 or SP2 for IS 2009 (I can't remember which exactly). Can you confirm you have SP2 applied and this setup was built with it?