Strange Major upgrade problem

[kenzo22]

Hello all, I am testing the major upgrade functionality of my installer. I firstly install a low version, and then install a higher version, the installtion completes successfully. It seems the installer have successfully uninstalled the lower version and then installed the higher version.

After that, I launched the application, bomb, strange things happen 😞 It seems automatically launched uninstalltion, which notifies me to close some applications since these applications are using files needed by the uninstalltion process.

I just ingore these messages, and I think something is running in the backend, after a while, it pops up a window saying "Dll custom action unknown sourece ." error, but after all this happen, my application can still work properly...

Guys, please help me, I am really confused right now 😞

[DebbieL]

Does the Event Viewer give you any clues as to what may be happening?

[reachyouvenkat7]

Have you checked the LOG file?

[DebbieL]

When the installation launches back up after you have started your product, it may actually be Windows Installer thinking that something needs to be repaired. If this is the case, the Event Viewer might list components that Windows Installer thinks need to be repaired when the installer starts back up automatically.

The following MSDN page offers some background on why Windows Installer is probably trying to repair the specified component:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa371546(VS.85).aspx

Here are some other explanations that might be helpful:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2005/01/13/352649.aspx
http://www.msifaq.com/a/1037.htm

[kenzo22]

Hello Debbiel, thanks very much for your response, actually I thought the installer is launch a self-repair process, but the message box indicate "applications are using files needed by the uninstalltion process.", which confuses me. Event viewer is a good suggestion, but right now the test engineer can't reproduce this problem... Once I got this phenomenon reproduced, I will dig into the event viewer and let you know the result, thanks again 🙂

[kenzo22]

Hello reach, yes, I have checked the log file. Actually, the whole process produces 4 log files... Let me tell you, when the major upgrade completes successfully, it produces one log file, in which I can find "IS_MAJOR_UPGRADE=Yes".

When I launch my application, after the self-uninstall or self-repair(I am not sure which one happens) bla bla bla happened, it produces 3 more log files, and the file name is not what I specified before, such as "MSI3b8c3.log", "MSI3bb91.log", etc. In these three files, two are very short, the other is very long.

In that long log file, I found most of them are "MSI (s) (94!D8) [17:58:56:070]: Creating MSIHANDLE (14720) of type 790531 for thread 3032
MSI (s) (94!D8) [17:58:56:070]: Closing MSIHANDLE (14720) of type 790531 for thread 3032"

Following are some lines that I think maybe useful:
"MSI (s) (94 D0) [17:57:14:452]: Product registered: entering maintenance mode"
"MSI (s) (94:D0) [17:58:57:064]: Skipping FindRelatedProducts action: not run in maintenance mode"
"MSI (s) (94:D0) [17:58:57:236]: Skipping MigrateFeatureStates action: not run in maintenance mode"
"MSI (s) (94:D0) [17:59:01:058]: Skipping RemoveExistingProducts action: current configuration is maintenance mode or an uninstall"