I have a setup project created by Visual Studio 2005, and consists of both a C# .NET 2.0 project and C++ MFC project, and the C++ run time. It works properly when run from the main console, but when run over a Terminal Server session on a Windows XP target, the install fails in the following way -
When the Setup.exe is invoked, it immediately crashes before the first welcome screen is displayed. When invoked over a physical console, the setup runs normally.
I figured I could go back to a lab machine to debug, but it runs fine on a lab machine over Terminal Server.
I see other descriptions of setup problems over Terminal Server sessions, but I don't see a definite solution. Both machines have a nearly identical configuration except that the one that is failing also has the GoToMyPC Host installed.
Has anyone else seen these problems, and how can I troubleshoot this?
Thanks,
I had LOTS of issues with developing installers (and software in general) for terminal server. I hate that damn thing.
Anyway, VS Setup Projects are just .msi files, and run using the Windows installer framework.
This will drop a log file when it errors out, they're called MSIc183.LOG (swap the c183 for some random numbers and letters), and they go in your logged-in-user account's temp directory.
The easiest way to find that is to type %TEMP% into the windows explorer address bar - once you're there have a look for these log files, they might give you a clue.
Note - Under terminal server, sometimes the logs don't go directly into %TEMP%, but under numbered subdirectories. If you can't find any MSIXYZ.LOG files in there, look for directories called 1, 2, and so on, and look in those.
If you find a log file, but can't get any clues from it, post it here. I've looked at more than I care to thing about, so I may be able to help
Before installing, drop to a command prompt and type
CHANGE USER /INSTALL
Then install your software. Once the install has completed, drop back to the command prompt and type:
CHANGE USER /EXECUTE
Alternatively, don't start the installation by a double click but instead go to Add/Remove Programs and select "install software" from there.
Good luck!
Related
I just recently upgraded to Windows 10 and ever since I have upgraded I can't get into VB6. I keep getting the System Registry error. I have googled and tried about everything and nothing seems to work. Running VB6 as Administrator is not an option, don't ask but we can't have admin to our computers we have to be logged in as users. The way we use to fix it was to trick Windows 7 log on as Admin run VB6 as Admin then switch me back to user and it worked, but this no longer works. Does anyone have any suggestions that currently have VB6 working as a user and not admin? I really don't want to resort to have to run it out of my virtual machine :( Thanks in advance!
Amanda,
I know it is 3 years later and I wonder what you did. and my solution may be late.
I moved VB6 Enterprise to a Windows10 machine, I did not upgrade the machine to Win10 with the IDE. However to make it work for some of my clients with Win10 machines I:
Back up all the VB6 files, folder and directories.
Using control panel in Win10, uninstall VB6 app. That's right, uninstall!
Using the original install disk, running it as an Administrator, install the program.
If the program has been updated to a later version, you need to get a copy of the latest version and copy over the one that was installed.
Or, Sweet Talk your IT guy into making you a new install disk with the latest version you are supposed to be running.
Go to the folder where the exe file is installed, Right Click on it and open the Properties, and go to the Compatibility tab.
Choose run as an administrator, and also click the Run this program in compatibility mode for Windows XP Service Pack3, or if it shows Latest version of Windows XP try that. You may need to check with your IT department.
Warning: if the VB6 program uses any non-Microsoft tools you may need to register them by hand.
I suspect this has already been worked out for you, but I put it here for anyone that may stumble across it, needing it.
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.
I made a minor change to a legacy Visual C++ / MFC app built with VS 2008. I changed some UI resources in the .rc file and compiled without any problems, then deployed it on my client's system. However, the program which was previously doing fine now fails to run on exactly one of their servers. It works fine on my laptop and on their other servers, many of whom are basically identical to the one having the trouble.
The weird thing however is that there is absolutely no error message whatsoever. No message box, no errorlevel set (when run on command prompt), no Dr. Watson entry, no nothing.
It's an MFC app that does not really comprise anything very special. It does link in some external libraries – e.g., some old version of the Xerces C++ XML parser. But this is probably not too relevant, right?
The program has a class derived from CWinApp, and I tried to add some logging in its constructor. Based on this, it looks like not even this constructor is reached.
The server in question is running Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition Service Pack 2, and we are trying to run the program in a Remote Desktop session. (Because of the client's environment, I cannot easily test in a console session right now.)
I reverted my changes from version control, which did not help – but I do not know if I had built myself the previously installed version (which ran just fine even on this server) or if it had been built by someone else.
Have also tried to reinstall the Visual C++ runtime libraries and of course reboot Windows, but neither helped. Now I'm really running out of ideas... Any clues on what I could try or check?
Probably some error occurs but is surpressed e.g. empty catch() statement or similar.
You could try and install Debugging tools for Windows WinDbg to see if you could get more info when trying to run it. Since the download is rather small 25Mb maybe it is possible to install it on your client's PC.
But first check the eventview log for your app, maybe there is something in there that can shed some light.
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).
I am trying to build a windows service that includes a Lua component, and links with Lua's shared libraries. I am building the code in Eclipse/CDT with MinGW. It builds fine, but when I run it, I get "Application failed to Initialize Properly (0x80000003). Click OK to terminate".
I am looking for clues as to what might be going on. A Hello World program compiles and runs fine, so there are no basic environment issues (I hope!). BTW, I am running on XP Home.
Update:
OK, I have figured out, by some guesswork, what was going on, and thought I'd post this for the benefit of others who might run into a similar problem - I think the lua DLL I was linking to, at runtime, was a different version than the one I built with. This caused the app initialization to fail I guess. When I made them to be the same file, things started working. I have not looked into why this would cause app init to fail, but I guess some symbol being at a different address or something? Or could it be that the DLLs were built with different tool chains?
This might be caused by not having permissions to access the DLLs required by the application. Are you logged in as an Administrator or member of the Administrator group?
Try logging in as Administrator to see if the problem goes away. This will help determine if it's a permissions issue, and then you can explore that further.
You could also try using the Dependency Walker (depends.exe) to see if this highlights any problems.
Cause of this problem is to try to run DOS programs, or 16-bit programs in Windows XP
To run DOS programs, or 16-bit environment in windows xp
To do so go to Start , Run and type gpedit.msc
And there go to:
User Configuration
Administrative Templates
Start Menu and Taskbar
And double-click on
Add "Run in Separate Memory Space" check box to Run dialog box
Select Enabled and then OK.
If the problem is not resolved, we will have to disable the Dr Watson , Do the following:
Go to the Start
Programs
Accessories
System Tools
System Information
Then go to:
Tools
Dr Watson
Or go to Start , Run and type drwtsn32
And disable:
Dump All Thread Contexts
And
Create Crash Dump File
And press:
OK
And then restart your computer .......
And then you will be able to run any game or program is running Dos or 16-bit, within Windows xp.