Hello,
I'm currently finishing up a major upgrade of our software and have come across a very annoying problem with the installer. We use the Visual Studio 2008 installer and have made some changes to the installer project as part of this upgrade.
In the old version it created some files and folders inside the users application data. This meant that whenever a new user ran the program it reran the installer to make sure the files were written to the new users application data as well. Obviously this is fairly annoying, so for the new version we moved it into the program and removed the users application data folder from the installers file system.
We also have a custom action that creates some folders and copies some files into the application data folder of the account installing it. It uses the same names as the installer used to use.
When we use the new installer to upgrade from the last version of the software, it installs everything, runs the custom action and then seems to detect that the user application data folder is no longer part of the installer and deletes the folders.
How can I stop it deleting everything i'm putting in with the custom action? I have noticed that this only happens with fresh installs of the old version, and that if the user has put more files inside the folders created with the installer it doesn't get deleted.