Program opens during install and halts MSI till quit

Question

I have been asked to fix a small problem with one of our small product's install. Its a basic .msi file (about 0.5 megs) that was created in Microsoft Visual Studio. When you run the installer it goes and installs the program, just like it should, then when the progress bar is about 99% done the program that it installed loads up, stalling the installer.

If I go and Exit the running program the installer then finishes and lets me exit. If I dont exit the program I have to go into task manager to exit the installer's process.

I have searched everywhere for a solution to this and I cant find anyone else with a similar problem. I have gone though the code and I cant find anything that would be causing this. Is it just a stupid setting that I am missing?

Sorry for being so vague, I don't know what information is relevant. Thanks!

Answer 1

Does the program have some form of self registration that it needs to perform.

Installer Blocks inside it etc.

Check what it does when you run InstallUtil against it.

Answer 2

What's happening is this:

The installer is set up to run the application as part of the install process. This is wrong, because then the installer can't move on to the next part of the install (which happens to be finishing everything up and exiting the installer) until the current part is finished. In other words, the install won't finish until you exit the app.

You want to run the application after the install has been committed - see here for details.

Answer 3

Refer the documentation on Custom Action Return Processing Options, your setup is waiting for an error/success return code after running your application. You need to update the custom action that is launching your program to ignore the return code and not wait for execution to complete.