Setup and Deployment Project - VS2005

Question

Hi I built a VS 2005 Setup and Deployment project and i'm able to install the setup without any problems. But, if I reboot my computer, the setup utility is being run again, asking me to install the software again (It already exists). I have not run into this problem before, any help would be greatly apperciated.

Thanks!

This is what I see in the windows event viewer, under application:

Event Type: Warning Event Source: MsiInstaller Event Category: None Event ID: 1001 Date: 3/6/2009 Time: 8:14:49 AM Description: Detection of product '{2B4F800C-FA4E-42D9-93D3-C3DC4A4FCAB7}', feature 'AlwaysInstall' failed during request for component '{D2D7B4BF-6CCA-11D5-8B3F-00105A9846E9}'

I don't recall seeing the 'AlwaysInstall' property anywhere in the project, where do I set or un-set this??

Answer 1

I don't know about this specific error, but I have seen similar behavior when I sometimes deleted some seemingly nonessential parts of the application, such as possibly desktop shortcuts, Start Menu shortcuts, config files installed by the original installer, etc. Next time I'd try to run the app, msiexec would kick in and try to reinstall the application.

Answer 2

Is it possible that prior to the reboot one of the installed files has been modified for some reason?

I'm not familiar with the error message, but perhaps Windows installer is attempting to repair the installation on reboot?

Have you tried installing the product once, then prior to rebooting running the installer again and selecting the repair option and seeing if this succeeds? If the repair fails at this point, run it again from the command line with verbose logging turned on:

msiexec /lv logfile.txt /i "MyInstaller.msi"

and when the error message pops up check out the last thing to happen in the log file.