Ah, that sounds like you have an explorer window open in the release folder where the intermediate files are built. ... View more

You need to speak to Flexera tech support and ask them to de-register the old version.  It is a pain, I've had this happen a couple of times over the years, but they are usually very quick at responding to this and I don't think this requires a maintenance agreement with them. ... View more

The warning dialog box should be generated with a "SpawnDialog" event (as opposed to a "NewDialog").  That will leave the originating dialog in play.  Then when you click the OK button it's behaviour event needs to be set to EndDialog|Return ... View more

You haven't provided anywhere near enough information to answer this question properly, but it has to be one or more issues with either the version numbers of the files or the upgrade settings you are running. I'm not sure why the IDE mode works, but it is a red herring, the only thing that matters is whether your release builds work. I suspect the IDE runs in Major Upgrade mode, but you've got your release builds set to Minor or something else. Questions: . Are you running a major or minor upgrade? . Have you spun the Package and Product GUIDs? . Is the Upgrade GUID identical between the two releases . What are the relevant versions of the files being installed, compared to the existing files. . Does an upgrade actually run when you run the release or does it look like a fresh install? . Are you using the upgrade setting: "Completely uninstall old setup before installing new setup" . Are you running in UI mode or silent mode? . Have you logged the install? ... View more

Thanks for the response Jenifer. I am familiar with what should happen and I did compare the logs of a working machine versus non working one (although it stated it had completed successfully), which is how I determined that the non working one didn't think any of the features were installed. What I needed was the nut and bolts of how the MSI engine determined which features were installed and after further investigation I found that it was a set of registry settings namely. [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Installer\Features\<MangledProductGUID>] "<TopLevelFeature>"="" "<SubFeature>"="<TopLevelFeature>"   [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\S-1-5-18\Products\<MangledProductGUID>\Features] "<TopLevelFeature>"="<HugeRandomStringOfCharacters>" "<SubFeature>"="<HugeButDifferentRandomStringOfCharacters> <TopLevelFeature>" Where <MangledProductGUID> = 42E15F854475F1D41AD1B0543CC43EFA instead of {58F51E24-5744-4D1F-A11D-0B45C34CE3AF} On a bad machine I found the second set of entries missing, while the first set of entries appeared corrupted as follows: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Installer\Features\<MangledProductGUID>] "<TopLevelFeature>"="[ACK]" "<SubFeature>"="[ACK] <TopLevelFeature>" Further investigation found that the apparant corruption was the unicode character ACK, which is actually a valid entries used by the MSI engine to indicate that a feature in not installed. It appears that the entries for all features are added to the registry with the ACK character flagging which ones aren't installed. However, it doesn't seem possible or shouldn't be possible to have the MSI engine flag the <TopLevelFeature> as not installed. Attempting to install the product on a fresh machine and choosing no features on the CustomSetup dialog results in no install of the product, rather than a featureless install, even though the install runs to completion. At this point I don't think the problem is in the installer but an environmental issue. The problem has happened on about 100 out of 800 machines on a single customer with the last upgrade sent out. This customer installs the product via a GPO process. Other customers have no problem and some of them also use a GPO process. Although a second customer did initially report issues this turned out to be on a single machine with an unrelated problem. However, my Support department are coming to me for answers. But although I can now manually replicate the problem, I can't explain how the customer machines got into that state in the first place and the customer is adamant that there is nothing wrong with their environment. ... View more

And if you can't do as Georg1 suggested... do it with a custom action using ICACLS. ... View more

IS has always installed side by side in my experience. Your right about the file extensions. I wrote a program once about 8 years ago that acted as a version selector. It would look at the ISSchemaVersion in the ISM and launch the right version of IS if installed. Kind of like Visual Studio. It was very easy to write... I'm not sure why Flexera never did this. I guess they just want you on the latest and don't understand that some customers have 2,3,4 versions of IS installed to support different product baselines that choose not to move on. ... View more

You might be waiting a while. For the most part, the product is mature as it is going to get. The underlying engine (Msiexec.exe) for the most part has stopped being updated by Microsoft, because everyone is moving to Cloud platforms. The latest package formats don't require a sophisticated packaging tool because of how they work (webdeploy, docker, kubernetes, xcopy, etc.) and so some superficial support was added for some of these, but there's not likely to be much more that can be done with IS. ... View more

We've come across this problem on numerous occasions in the past, I finally found what I believe to be the answer here: http://www.laurierhodes.info/?q=node/46 In a nutshell, the problem is that Windows Installer evaluates the components *before* the previous version is uninstalled, meaning that components may not be marked for inclusion because they are older/have not changed. The uninstall then removes these components, and when the install stage goes through those components are not marked to be installed. According to that article, Windows Installer expects that the RemoveExistingProducts custom action is performed at the end of the installation as a kind of "cleanup" operation, not at the start as InstallShield traditionally places it. If it is placed at the beginning then the ref counting mechanism does not work, thus components can go missing. We are in the process of moving RemoveExistingProducts to the end of the Installation/Execute sequence for all our products as this appears to be much more reliable. Hope this helps. ... View more

You make it sound like 'they' had a choice in the matter. But in fact the new signing encryption was forced on them by a security problem. I suspect that it was NOT anticipated that SHA-256 would fail on .msi files and the lack of information on the subject is because a solution still hasn't been found. Curiously, the .msi's I've produced since the 1st January still work as do individual binaries encrypted by an SHA-1 algorithm. So it looks like the security patch meant to enforce this hasn't been deployed yet. What I don't understand is why Flexera/InstallShield don't seem to have the first clue as to what is going on, when they should be camping on Microsoft's door demanding information. ... View more

Check out the file versioning rules. ... View more

I can't remember the exact cause of the problem, but I believe I know the solution. You are trying to cache the MSI to [LocalAppDataFolder] this is the default location offered by certain versions of InstallShield, but it is wrong and can't be accessed on Vista and Above by a process running as the System user... or something like that. You need to change the cache location to [CommonAppDataFolder], but I'm not sure that will solve your problem until the next round of upgrades as it may be the old installer already out there that is throwing up this error on the uninstall. ... View more

Solution: Thank you hidenori, that post did contain the answer, although it wasn't very clearly explained and I'm going to repost the solution here, hopefully more clearer. You need to add entries into the "MsiShortcutProperty" table. This table exists at the very least in IS2011, but I found I could import or create it in an IS11.5 project and it works fine. There are four fields: 1. MsiShortCutProperty This is the keyfile for the table, any unique name can be given here 2. Shortcut_ This is a ForeignKey from the "Shortcut" table, unfortunately it is not a drop down list, you have to make sure you spell and capitilise it correctly as per the entry in that table 3. PropertyKey Hardcode it to the following: {9F4C2855-9F79-4B39-A8D0-E1D42DE1D5F3}, 12 4. PropVariantValue Hardcode it to the following: 1 Example: MyShortcut1 MyShortcut1 {9F4C2855-9F79-4B39-A8D0-E1D42DE1D5F3}, 12 1 You need one of these entries for each shortcut you want unpinning from the "Start" screen. They will still appear on the "All Apps" screen. For shortcuts that you want on both screens I believe you can set the final field (PropVariantValue) to "0", but I simply didn't bother adding an entry for them and that worked fine for me. You do not need to set any other property as suggested in the other thread - in fact trying to set "System.AppUserModel.ID" actually screwed things up for me. What you do need to be aware of, is that Windows 8 'remembers' the settings so you only get one shot at it. Thus when testing do it on a virtual machine or dedicated test machine that you can reimage after each install attempt. Because once you have unpinned a tile you cannot uninstall and put it back with your next attempt. This I think is intended behaviour to allow users to customise their experience and not have a reinstall or repair undo all their customisations. However, this left me banging my head against a wall for a while as I couldn't understand why my installer changes didn't have any effect after I'd been playing around manually pinning and unpinning the shortcuts on an earlier attempt. ... View more