InstallAware

Dear Sheri,

you are un-registering a dll which exposes a shell context menu, but I suppose that a system restart may be required to effectvely complete the un-registration.

I suspect that the calling process (Windows Explorer) is still using that dll ...also because "generally" it's not possible to detach a DLL from its parent process without terminating the process itself.

Regards

Francesco,

After some investigating, as we both suspected, it is the DLL loaded by the Explorer.exe process that triggers the dialog.

My issue now is that we haven't been triggering the restart now/later option for these shell extensions (we've just been getting away with it) and the way my script is coded now with with X6 and the new Restart Manager we are suddenly seeing this issue.

This prompting to kill Windows Explorer is a complete showstopper for us.

We can't ship this install as it is now; the "in use" dialog basically lets the user click yes and completely tear down the entire Windows Explorer UI shell, leaving them with just a black screen with the install dialog. No menu, no taskbar, no desktop icons, nothing. Not to mention what this would do in a terminal services environment.

This behaviour seems fundamentally wrong to me and CANNOT happen on our client machines - as a developer I know tricks to restart Windows Explorer but I can't expect all of my clients to know this.

Any install that hooks anything into the Windows shell will now have this problem, and even if I wan't being responsible and "cleaning" up after my install, the dialog would still appear.

My question now is how do I update/remove this file as part of my upgrade/uninstall process? Is there a way to mark it as replace/remove after reboot?

Is there a way to make this file trigger an option to restart now/later?

Thanks,
Sheri

Dear Sheri,

why don't you force a "Reboot and Resume" just after un-registering your DLL?

Doing in this way you should not have any problem.

Regards

I do quite a few shell extensions and namespaces and although there are some ways around it, it is best that you restart explorer especially when doing an uninstall. There is no need for a full reboot.

There is an IA Plugin at the link below as well as C# source for something I use...

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=10646

Thanks for sharing your findings!

Regards

this is the new Restart Manager support in the new InstallAware X6. Clicking No on the dialog shown would fall back to default InstallAware X5 and earlier behavior (which would actually require a reboot). Clicking Yes would attempt to prevent a reboot by using the Restart Manager.

Clicking Cancel would abort the installation.

Currently, it's not possible to make this behavior optional.

Please Installaware, my installer instructions tells the installer to install, start, stop and uninstall the service(s).
If I wanted the end-user involved in the service management I would have placed my own dialog there letting them do precise that.
This is a breaking change and not acceptable. Sure, you have posted up a work-around, and that's fine, but it's not a solution to the root problem.
You surely can't expect your customers to modify all their installer projects because you messed up?
Please remove the dialog asap.

Best Regards
/Bjarne

*bump*