Strange issue with Basic MSI and Small Upgrade

[Scherger]

I have an interesting problem happening that I'm having trouble figuring out.

We run the original Basic MSI installer and then upgrade the machine with our small upgrade executable. Everything installs fine from what I can tell and our software is running perfectly. When we try to open a completely unrelated product from a different vendor it starts up our original basic MSI installer three times in a row and we have to cancel out in order for the other piece of software to start.

I just want to emphasize that the program we're opening is something I've never even heard of before and completely unrelated to our software.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

[DebbieL]

It sounds like Windows Installer is trying to repair your product (or maybe a redistributable that is installed with your product). The Event Viewer may have some clues about what is going on. It logs events where Windows Installer (logged as the MsiInstaller source) is trying to reinstall or repair something. That would help in troubleshooting the issue.

[Scherger]

Thanks for the reply.

I ran through the whole process again this morning and nothing seems to be logged in the event viewer. Any other ideas?

[DebbieL]

Can you post a screen shot of what you see in the Event Viewer?

[Scherger]

I can't at the moment. It's happening on a customer's machine that I am unable to vpn into today since they are too busy. I do know that nothing was logged into event viewer when this was happening. Any messages in the event viewer were for previous days and none of them said MSIInstaller.

[DebbieL]

Ah, got it. I'm not sure what to suggest, then. Unfortunately, if nothing gets logged by Windows Installer, there's not much else that can be checked without a manually time-consuming process of elimination. I have heard of one similar report where this type of thing happened on a Windows 7 machine with Office 2003 auto-repairing; no MsiInstaller events were logged in Event Viewer.

[J_anitha]

Could you post your installation log file for the other vendor software installer?

[Scherger]

Unfortunately I can't. They tell me that piece of software has been on the computer for at least a year and the customer is unwilling to reinstall it so we can get a new log.

[Cary_R]

Hi There,

I would probably suggest running a repair of your software to see if that helps:

msiexec.exe /i yourpackage.msi REINSTALLMODE=amus /qr

This should rewrite everything, and hopefully fix whatever broken keypath is on the machine.

[CChong]

Hmmm, that's interesting since I currently see some kind of this behavior with advertised shortcuts. And I see something in the event viewer - thanks for the tip! - but what does the following message pattern tell?

Detection of product '', feature 'MAIN' failed during request for component ''

MAIN is the feature those advertised shortcuts are associated with; my problem is that this MSI event is not only triggered for the 1st time the shortcuts are activated (which I'd assume to be normal) but every time! Probably this is so only for my development machines which have seen much too much installations of this product, on a brandnew Windows 7 all is dandy until now, no such behavior.
What do I need to check in the registry in order to get rid of? :confused:

[Scherger]

So I was able to get into a different machine that was having this same issue and get some messages from the event log.

Detection of product '{AD5CFF92-F70D-4459-AD35-30D95D7DCF3C}', feature 'Star_Link_Files', component '{66F2294C-5620-40F9-8BD0-13594E243802}' failed. The resource 'C:\Program Files\Auto-Star\StarLink\VendorEditor.exe' does not exist.

Detection of product '{AD5CFF92-F70D-4459-AD35-30D95D7DCF3C}', feature 'Star_Link_Files' failed during request for component '{FC3E0B6E-F62B-11D1-B144-00C04F990B2B}'

We rewrote our Vendor Editor in C# recently so I deleted the old one in a program I call from the installer. I didn't remove it from the files and folders view in my install shield project. Should I just be leaving those old programs there from now on?

The second message has me stumped. When I search for that component id in the direct editor nothing is found in the original install or any of my small upgrades. Any ideas on this one?

[Scherger]

I rebuilt my small upgrade to see if that would fix my issue and am now getting an error that I've seen before. I've never found any info to tell me what I'm doing wrong to cause this. I usually just rebuild the install and try it again and that sometimes fixes the problem.

Error 2721. Custom action ISSelfRegisterCosting not found in Binary table stream.

I did not create this custom action, Installshield must have. I did not modify it at all either. The dll that this custom action is trying to call exists on my machine where it's looking for it.

Any ideas on this problem?

[Cary_R]

Hi There,

The second error in the event log is probably referencing a component that's dynamically created when you build the MSI package--I would check the built MSi in Direct Edit mode to see what this lines up with.

For error 2721, I've never found a good resolution to this once you run into it. Near as I've been able to figure out, it stems from something getting corrupted with the in-memory MSI package that corrupts the binary streams in the database. This breaks any custom action stored in the Binary table, and anything else stored in the internal _streams table (like icon resources, support files, embedded transforms, etc.).

The only way I've found around this was to basically either change up the upgrade/patch until the corruption no longer occurs, or to switch to a Major Upgrade. If it's in a patch a full Small/Minor upgrade might work, though.

So, step one would be to track down the component and see if rebuilding with that copy of the MSI will just get around 2721.

[Scherger]

Thanks Cary, I will try that.

[Scherger]

So I had a look at the patch in Orca and the component it's complaining about is:

Global_Controls_Comdlg32ocx.576D64B0_7413_11D2_B954_006097C4DE24 {FC3E0B6E-F62B-11D1-B144-00C04F990B2B} System.576D64B0_7413_11D2_B954_006097C4DE24 24 Global_Controls_Comdlg32ocx_f0.576D64B0_7413_11D2_B954_006097C4DE24

I'm not sure what I did to have this component be added to the patch though...or how to fix it.

[CChong]

That's from COMDLG32.MSM, watch out for "Microsoft Common Dialog Control 6.0" merge module in the Redistributables View being associated with one or more of your features. There's only 1 COM server in it, comdlg32.ocx, I would check if your installation can live without it.