Error 1001 on uninstall - installation

Error 1001. An exception occurred while uninstalling. This exception
will be ignored and the uninstall will continue. However, the
application might not be fully uninstalled after the uninstall is
complete
I can't uninstall or install the application. This particular box is not able to access the internet and I don't have physical access so most of the googleable results are not useful since they suggest running an exe from Microsoft.
What are the manual steps to resolving this issues. There is no way I can physically reach this machine nor does there seem to be a way for me to get files onto it. This is code that I'm developing and testing. I've tried repair and remove which fails out. I've scoured the registry but I must be missing something here.
If this is better on SuperUsers I'll gladly move it.

I had the same uninstall issue removing an application that I wrote that includes two Windows Services, ergo custom actions were unavoidable. I solved it be running PC Tools Registry Mechanic. Unfortunately, Symantec has retired that product. However, Microsoft Fixit has been known to help with registry related problems. http://support.microsoft.com/mats/Program_Install_and_Uninstall

1001 always means an InstallUtil (Installer Class) custom action has failed. It's impossible to give you a more detailed answer because, well, it's a "custom" action. There is no telling what code is throwing an exception.
If you want to save this machine and not have to rebuild it, you have to log the uninstall to get the name of the custom action that's failing, use ORCA to tweak the MSI to cut out the custom action, recache the MSI and perform an uninstall.
You've now learned the hardway why to:
1) Always use VM's to test your MSI during the development / test life cycle
2) Avoid using custom actions whenever possible
3) Never use InstallUtil custom actions. They are not a good pattern or practice.

1.Goto control panel then right click to get repair option.
2.Repair it and again uninstall after repair.
Here you go the software is uninstalled..

Make a verbose log file:
msiexec.exe /I "File.msi" /QN /L*V "C:\Temp\msilog.log"
/I = run installation sequence
/L*V "C:\Temp\msilog.log"= verbose logging
/QN = run completely silently
Open it in notepad, and search for value 3. Also check the system's event log for any clues.

Most MSI errors like this will probably involve custom actions, or service configuration like Chris says.
If this is really important to chase down you should get hold of Orca - the SDK tool used to inspect MSI files. You can see some screenshots of the tool in operation in this answer. And then inspect the Custom Action table and the end of the InstallExecuteSequence table (order by sequence number) and report what entries you find there.
Unfortunately it seems the only way to get hold of Orca is by installing the Windows SDK. Alternatively you can download a trial version of one of the third party installer tools.
My guess is that there is an immediate mode custom action after InstallFinalize that is returning an error code of some sort. In short you can report all items AFTER InstallFinalize in the InstallExecuteSequence and we can probably narrow it down.

That resolve the 1001 problem uninstalling windows service in Windows Server 2012 R2 I did:
Go to program and select Modify Service
Select repair Service
Close the applet, select again Modify Service
Now Select uninstall.
I hope this help

Related

Visual Studio Installer Projects for 2013 -- can't uninstall a program on Windows 8.1

I'm trying to use this Visual Studio extension for 2013, which recreates the built-in installer functionality from Visual Studio 2008/2010: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2014/04/17/visual-studio-installer-projects-extension.aspx?CommentPosted=true&PageIndex=2#comments
It works, allowing me to edit the project as before. It has the install and uninstall commands when right-clicking the install project, too. It installs fine.
When I try to uninstall, though, I get the following error and then the uninstall rolls back:
Could not open key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE32\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\
EAPSIMMethods\18\FastReauthContext. Verify that you have sufficient
access to that key, or contact your support personnel.
I am not doing anything with that registry key, and there don't seem to be any relevant results on google-- at least not in the normal top 5 pages. Does anyone know what causes this or how I can fix it?
While I am not able to uninstall, I am able to increment the version of the package and allow it to remove the previous install and install the new version (all at once) successfully.
I am using Windows 8.1 Pro 64 bit, the projects are compiled for <AnyCPU>, and the installer is configured for x86.
EDIT I am running Visual Studio as Admin. When uninstalling from the Control Panel, I am also clicking the 'allow' button in the UAC dialog window that pops up.
I know how to give myself access to a registry key (permissions). I want to know why this key is trying to be removed. I support this app on several machines and I don't want to have worry about remembering an uninstall hack in the future.
EDIT This only seems to be an issue for a 32x installer on a 64x OS or a Windows 8 issue. I was able to use the same 32x installer to successfully uninstall the app on a 32x Windows 7 machine.
This must be an environmental problem, that key doesn't have anything to do with installers. EAP-SIM is an authentication protocol for wireless networks. The FastReauthContext key almost surely was meant to avoid having to provide a username+password each time your machine reconnects to the network. Which makes the registry key content very sensitive of course, it can only be read by a service that runs with the System account.
So, something goofy going on with your networking setup. Verify that you can successfully reconnect to such a network. If you used a VPN before then make sure it is active again. Something like this. Update your question with anything that might be relevant to networking when you first installed the app.
I have had similar problem and what I found out this is caused by MSI attempting to delete whole "Software\Microsoft" section in the registry. Lucky you that it encounters this error and rolls everything back.
So the solution is the following:
Since you have installed your program whenever you try to uninstall it the system will run msi from cache that is usually located C:\Windows\Installer.
Find your package in the cache. Here is an article that may help you http://csi-windows.com/blog/all/27-csi-news-general/334-identifying-cached-msi-packages-in-cwindowsinstaller-without-opening-them
Open the package in Orca. You must do this as administrator.
Go to Registry table and find record with "Software\Microsoft" as a key. Most likely the Name column will contain either "-" or "*" value. This means that during uninstall MSI will try to delete whole "Software\Microsoft".
Either change the Name value to empty or "+" or try to change key to something like "Microsoft". The second option will cause that installer will not find the key to delete during uninstall, but it will skip this error and let you uninstall your program.
You installed an untested installer on your dev machine? Speaking from experience, don't do that! Snapshotted VM's are cheap and will save you from this sort of pain.
Visual Studio Deployment Projects (or VSI as it's now called ) is known for creating very poor quality installs. The combination of those two put you where you are today.
I would need to look at the full uninstall log and your MSI using ORCA to understand exactly what is going on. MSI Zap and a manual cleanup of resources is probably required at this point.

Debugging "service failed to start" Windows Installer error

I have a simple msi written in WiX that installs a native NT service. After I have made some changes in the msi it fails at StartServices standard action with the error "service failed to start, verify you have sufficient privileges". If I press Ignore and start the service manually then it start successfully. The problem is definitely not in insufficient privileges. How can I diagnose/debug such issues? The verbose logs of the Windows Installer seem to not contain any helpful information.
The installer won't have any useful information because the error is only surfaced by the installer. Here's how I approach this.
Comment out the ServiceControl element so the installer doesn't try to start the service.
Run installer and all it to finish.
Manually start the service.
If the service starts, this indicates some type of race condition. One common scenario is the service has a dependency on a file being installed to the GAC or WinSXS. The installer puts these files there using the PublishAssemblies standard action. However since the GAC and WinSXS APIs don't support transational installation, PublishAssemblies waits until the commit phase to perform the work. This is after the installer attempts to start the service. Another common scenario would be if you had some custom action that was installing or configuring something that the service needed and you were doing it to late in the installation.
If the service still won't start, this generally rules out race conditions. You have to profile the service itself. Use tools such as depends, ildasm (if .net) and processexplorer (filemon / regmon ) to try to discover what the missing dependencies are. Update the installer then rinse and repeat.
As you've found, the Windows Installer does not provide useful information when it fails to start a service. However, when the dialog is displayed the machine is in the perfect state to determine what is going wrong. So, rather than cancel the install, start debugging. Try to start the service and see if that gives you more information. If not, break out the debugger and go to town.
I basically follow the process described in this FireGiant KB Article. This is the most direct approach to figuring out why the service fails to start. It's too bad the Windows Installer just couldn't provide better messages itself.

why does windows installer start up everytime i start up visual basic 6

it starts up windows installer with random applications on my machine . . after i click cancel a few times, it loads vb6 fine.
any ideas why this is happening?
To stop this behavior:
Start VB6
Open the Add-Ins dialog
Uncheck the "Visual Component Manager" Add-In
Source:
After VS2010, SP1, VB6 launches VS2010 installer
This is what a Windows Installer repair looks like. It means that something is broken in one of the installed products on your system. Ideally it's a one-off repair so you might be better off letting it runs its course and do the repair, except of course if it asks for a install CD that you don't have.
The Windows event log (Application) will have MsiInstaller entries saying what product and component has the problem.
It's possible a previous installation has not completed correctly.
Use the utility at the following link to remove any rogue installations files:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301 (broken link Aug.2017, leaving URL for "historical purposes").
As PhilDW has pointed out this is a Windows Installer Self-Repair issue, and can often be resolved by allowing the self-repair to complete once. At other times the problem persists and it should be fixed by other means. Even when the self-repair completes and the problem goes away, it can still resurface once you launch the conflicting application. Windows Installer is not easy to deal with.
In your particular case you might be able to get away with a "workaround" rather than a fix. By locating the main VB6 EXE file on disk (in its main installation directory) and manually creating a shortcut to it on your desktop, you might be able to successfully launch VB6 via this new shortcut without the self-repair kicking in. It might be worth a try.
This shortcut trick will not remove the underlying problem, but might help to "bypass it". Just for the record: the reason this might work is that the new, manually created shortcut is not "advertised" and will not trigger a key-path check of the installed product when launched. This is Windows Installer's way to verify that a product is correctly installed. Note that even if the workaround works, self-repair might still result during application use because of faulty COM data being detected (which is very likely the cause of the whole problem you are seeing, but give the manually created shortcut a try).
There is a rather comprehensive "article" on self-repair here: How can I determine what causes repeated Windows Installer self-repair? which might help to track down the cause of the self-repair kicking off in the first place, but fixing it can be a rather complicated process (so try the workaround first). It is a long article because there are so many different ways self-repair can occur. The common denominator is that different installers on your system are fighting over a shared setting that they keep updating with their own values on each application launch in an endless loop. The last application to launch will overwrite the registry or file system with its own setting.
This worked for me, for VS2010 RC:
"Please wait while windows configures Microsoft Visual studio 2010 Ultimate."
THe work around that fixes the issue for me was to run the following via the admin cmd prompt.
Md "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\common7\IDE\FromGAC"
from http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-SG/vsprereleaseannouncements/thread/572a0f8a-16b0-4e1d-b581-16be36a9b564
This was also happned to me.
Whenever i tried to open vb6, it started windows installer to configure "Autocad".
Autocad had not broken. and it was working fine.
I tried removing and reinstalling Windows Installer, But it did not solved the issue.
Then i installed Microsoft's "Windows Installer Clean Up Utility 2" from given link.
Using this utility i removed the autocad from "Windows Installers" Database.
After that VB6 never started installer again.
Keep in mind 'removing any entry from installer's database may be risky, but i had no choice. So do it on your own risk.
Download "Windows Installer Clean Up Utility 2" (this is a deprecated, unsupported and unsafe tool to use - Aug.2017. I will leave the link in for "historical purposes", don't use it).

How to interactive a silently installing msi? (Progress data and cancel it)

For some reason, we are delivering a product with our own install GUI, that means, we will run the msi installation silently background.
By using the MSI API "MsiInstallProduct", I can install the product silently, but I have no idea how can I get the progress data of this installation and how can I cancel it.
Anyone has some ideas?
UPDATE June 2018: Although the tool shown below is no longer available for download, I found it via Wayback machine. I assume it is OK and legal to link to it, seeing as the tool was freeware. Updated links below.
UPDATE: This tool from Wise is regrettably not downloadable anymore. I am not sure if it is OK to distribute it either. It seemed to be a free tool distributed as part of their main Wise Package Studio suite, but I don't think it is open source. I wish they would release it as an open source tool.
The Wise packaging products have been discontinued due to a number of legal issues.
I believe you can get the progress via the MSI API, but if I were you I would just show the progress bar from the MSI itself after invoking the install via msiexec.exe.
MSI supports several different installation levels (full, completely silent, basic GUI, reduced GUI etc...). In your case it sounds like you want a basic UI. This yields a progress bar where you can hide the cancel button, and optionally show a completion modal dialog:
Install silently with progress bar, no cancel button and no modal dialog at end:
msiexec.exe /I "Test.msi" /QB-!
To avoid having to construct these silly msiexec command lines manually, use the msi command line builder tool from Wise: http://www2.wise.com/filelib/WICLB.exe (resurrected from Wayback machine).
Please run the download by virustotal.com for safety.
Related:
installation using msi.exec open help options every time
Silent Install of MSI
How to install an MSI package from a command prompt
How do I force the Windows MSI installer to perform a complete install?
Silent Installer with custom selection
Here is a sample project that appears to do what you are referring to:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/msiinterop.aspx
You need to specify an external UI handler using MsiSetExternalUI or MsiSetExternalUIRecord before MsiInstallProduct (the latter is nicer, but has a higher MSI version requirement). The function you specify will be called for each message Windows Installer wants you to process. This will give you the data, and a chance to respond tell it to cancel. If you require MSI 4.5 or later, you can use an embedded external UI handler DLL, which does not require a bootstrap.

WiX 3.0 throws error 217, while being executed by continuous integration

This is the error that is thrown by our automated build suite on Windows 2008, while running ICEs (after migrating from WiX 2.0 to WiX 3.0):
LGHT0217: Error executing ICE action 'ICE01'. The most common cause of this kind of ICE failure is an incorrectly registered scripting engine. See http://wix.sourceforge.net/faq.html#Error217 for details and how to solve this problem. The following string format was not expected by the external UI message logger: "The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed. This can occur if the Windows Installer is not correctly installed. Contact your support personnel for assistance.". in light.exe(0, 0)
The FAQ is now deleted, however, the text from it said:
In WiX v3, Light automatically runs validation-- Windows Installer Internal Consistency Evaluators (ICEs) --after every successful build. Validation is a great way to catch common authoring errors that can lead to service problems, which is why it’s now run by default. Unfortunately, there’s a common issue that occurs on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 that can cause ICEs to fail. For details on the cause and how to fix it, see Heath Stewart's Blog and Aaron Stebner's WebLog.
Additionally, these are the errors that show up in the event log:
MSIInstaller: Failed to connect to server. Error: 0x80070005
Product: [ProductName] -- Error 1719. The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed. This can occur if the Windows Installer is not correctly installed. Contact your support personnel for assistance.
Intuitively:
VBScript and JScript were registered under admin.
Integration service has permissions for the desktop interaction and all the files
Builds succeed, when executed manually on the same machine by another user or even user logged in as integration account (via RDP)
I'm out of ideas so far.
How do I solve this problem while keeping ICE validation?
End of the story:
After fiddling with the permissions of the integration account, DCOM, service activation, etc. without any luck, I finally simply disabled ICE validation in the continuous integration build, while still keeping it in the local build.
To disable ICE validation you can set SuppressValidation to true in the .wixproj file:
<PropertyGroup>
<SuppressValidation>true</SuppressValidation>
</PropertyGroup>
Or pass the -sval command line option to light.exe.
Adding the TFS build controller account to local admin group and restarting the windows service did the job for me.
I found the root cause. I tried everything I found, including custom validator extension similar to one posted in Re: [WiX-users] light.exe failed randomly when running ICEs..
It's not a concurrency issue as suggested in various threads. It's caused by a too large Process Environment Block (PEB).
It turns out Windows Installer can’t handle a process environment block larger than 32 kB. In my environment, due to number of variables set by the build system and their size (for example, PATH variable containing multiple duplicated values), PEB was about 34 kB.
Interestingly, per Environment Variables, Windows XP and 2003 had a hard limit of PEB set to 32 kilobytes. That would probably cause an easy-to-catch build break in an earlier phase of the build. Newer Windows' doesn’t have such limit, but I guess that Windows Installer developers limited their internal environment buffers to 32 kB and fail gracefully when the value is exceeded.
The problem can be easily reproduced:
Create a .bat file which sets environment variables which size exceeds 32 kB. For example, it can be 32 lines of set Variable<number>=<text longer than 1024 characters>
Launch cmd.exe
Execute the batch file you created
From the same cmd.exe window:
Try building the MSI package using WiX with ICE validation on OR
Run smoke.exe to validate your package OR
Simply run msiexec /i Package.msi
All the above commands will end up reporting Error 1719 - Windows Installer could not be accessed.
So, the solution is - review your build scripts and reduce number and size of environment variables so they all fit into 32 kB. You can easily verify the results by running:
set > environment.txt
The goal is to get file environment.txt smaller than ~30 kB.
The correct description (without a solution, except if adding the CruiseControl account into local administrators group can pass as a solution) of the problem:
Quote from Wix 3.5 & Cruise Control gives errorLGHT0217:
ICE validation needs an interactive account or administrator privileges to be
happy. See for example WiX Projects vs. TFS 2010 Team Build (2009-11-14) or Re: [WiX-users] Help with building patch (2009-11-20).
imagi is totally right! I could not believe this is the true answer. Supressing validation and making TFS user Administrator are not good solutions. Plus I could not find NT\Authority to add it to Administrators group and was totally stuck in this.
I got the same error on Windows Server 2012 Datacenter as Build Agent.
To solve the problem :
List item
Go to Environment Variables on the build agent machine
Create two System Variables
"PF86" which is equal to "C:\Program Files (x86)"
"PF" which is equal to "C:\Program Files"
They are so short because I want to save characters.I made them without the final backslash because TEMP, TMP and others were made so and I decided to stick to MS standard for these variables.
Edit PATH variable by substituting every "C:\Program Files (x86)" with %PF86% and every "C:\Program Files" with %PF%
Close and build and enjoy!
It worked for me. :)
UPDATE
I found a better solution : Rapid Environment Editor will do all this and even more for you. Automatically.
I faced the same problem and did not like to suppress ICE validation. My setup: I used my own computer as a build agent on Visual Studio Online (VSO). My solution was to change the account used to run the service on my machine. Instead of using Network Service or Local Service I simply made the service log on with my own account which had all the necessary rights.
From http://wix.sourceforge.net/faq.html#Error217:
In WiX v3, Light automatically runs validation--
Windows Installer Internal Consistency Evaluators (ICEs)
--after every successful build. Validation is a
great way to catch common authoring errors that can lead to service problems,
which is why it’s now run by default. Unfortunately, there’s a common issue
that occurs on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 that can cause ICEs to
fail. For details on the cause and how to fix it, see
Heath Stewart's Blog
and
Aaron Stebner's WebLog.
I was getting same ICE error, but the problem turned to be corrupted Windows Installer Service.
This solution worked for me:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315353
Log on to your computer as an administrator.
Click Start, and then click Run.
In the Open box, type cmd, and then click OK.
At the command prompt, type msiexec.exe /unregister, and then press ENTER.
Type msiexec /regserver, and then press ENTER.
Restart Windows
Also, verify that the SYSTEM account has full control access permissions to the
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT hive in the Windows registry. In some cases, you may also have to add Administrator accounts.
I have some suggestions.
Try updating the Microsoft Installer version on the build server
Make sure you use the newest release of WiX 3.0, since it's 3.0 release stable now.
If all else fails, try running the build service under a specific build user who you can fiddle with permissions for...
I got this error from my Azure build agent running on-premises.
My solution was to upgrade its user account from "Network Service" to "Local system account".
Go to your build machine and restart the Windows Installer service
None of the above suggestions worked for me, for me the anti-virus (mcafee) came into the picture and looks like it updated the vbscript.dll registry entry to a wrong DLL location. These are the things to keep in mind:
Some of the WiX ICE validations are implemented using VBSCRIPT.
So while compiling the MSI, the build server would need access to the c:\windows\system32\vbscript.dll.
Chances are that somehow the user that runs your build lost access to this DLL.
As mentioned in the above answers do look for the admin access/registry access and make sure your user has it.
Here are the steps that I took to fix the issue:
Open cmd (run as admin) on the build agent machine.
Run RegEdit
Select the root, then click ctrl + f and Search for the following registry entry : {B54F3741-5B07-11cf-A4B0-00AA004A55E8}
Look for the InprocServer32\Default Key
On my build agent, the path was replaced with a mcafee DLL location. I updated the path back to c:\windows\system32\vbscript.dll
Editing the registry entry was not easy, as it was a protected registry entry. I used the below link to get access permissions changed before I could edit the property: Edit protected registry entry
Once I updated the path, everything started working as usual.
My solution is similar to Vladimir's one. My CI user was admin of the computer.
But the following steps were mandatory to allow my jenkins build to succeed:
log in as CI user using rdp
open a dos command prompt
execute: %windir%\system32\msiexec.exe /unregister
execute: %windir%\system32\msiexec.exe /regserver
then i got a successfull job

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