What would cause a Windows Installer package to lose its progress status?

Question

I have a WiX installer project which has recently been producing installers that don't show any file installation progress. That stage takes around 30 seconds to complete, and users may think that the install has hung since the progress bar remains empty until the install suddenly completes.

I know there used to be a progress bar for the installation, but not when the change occurred.

I'll start to narrow down what change caused this, but are there any common causes for this problem?

Answer 1

Did you create any custom actions? If so, be aware that you need to implement ProgressText messages and / or pump messages to update the ticks on the ProgressBar control.

Answer 2

Generate a verbose log file. The log file will have timestamps for all the actions (look for Action Start: type messages). A quick script can shred the log file and give you the times between actions. I did this for a few months at the end of Office2003 as we tracked down performance issues in the install. I wish I still had the VBScript (yeah, yeah, I know) that I wrote to get me the numbers.

It almost always comes down to custom acitons.