Windows Installer - Appears to hang

[SteveX]

I have an installation that when compressed takes up about 50 Megabytes. The installation works fine, except early in the Install a progress message displays saying Windows Installer and the progress bar sets itself to 100%. This will stay that way for up one half of the installation time. I change the Progressbar Type to Marquee and then set it back to null, the Margues stays that way through the rest of the installation. After it goes away the main program files are installed.

I was thinking this may be the point of where Merge-Modules were installed so I incorporated them directly ito the code and if anything it looks as if it made it worst.

What is actually going on at this point? In the Installer code it appears to be right after the Apply Install etc... commands.

This part executes after installation of PreReq's.

Thanks

[MichaelNesmith]

At this stage, the Windows Installer service is receiving control of your entire installation, and preparing to apply all changes to your system. This happens on the line where you have Apply Install or Apply Uninstall. It shouldn't take too long - try on other systems also.

[SteveDude]

I have since tried this on several systems including some outside beta testers all with the same results. (One user said it took 24 minutes before the install actually started) I also have recreated the installation several different ways - Wise Import Wizard, Starting from scratch using the create install from a folder layout and the Qick Start Wizard. I even tried using different dialog types, moving away from my custom screens with Flash to your default dialogs all with results taken around 10 to 15 minutes stuck on the Windows Installer Message and the progress bar set at 100 percent. Having the same problem with compressed and uncompressed installs.

I'm getting desparate on this. The problem seemed to go away with the build before this one, but is back again on the May 15 build of IA.

Attached a screenshot.

File Attached:

installaware.jpg

[swarovski]

i have also got this experience recently.

the method i use is comment most codes.
and then un-comment them and find which code make the setup hang.

for my case, the setup hang on Apply Install on the upgrade scenario.

Finally i dont know how to solve and just restore the "work" from SVN and modify again...

[SteveDude]

Michael,

I figured out the problem, but don't have a really good solution...please check your email.

Thanks,

Steve

[SteveDude]

It looks like there is a bug when adding many registry entries. The problem occurs after using Import .REG/COM Information for many files, instead of using the self registering mechanism that will fail on some COM objects when installing to Windows Vista. Doing that kicked my build times up to hours instead of minutes and increased the the actual installation time to about 4 times what it is using the Self Register option.

I would like to see IA do it like InstallShield does and automatically extract the info at build time and add it internally to the setup. So far this has been the only thing that would make me want to use InstallShield over InstallAware. This would make the installs much more rock solid. I consider this a pretty serious bug, especially when many of us still use COM. Not sure if the bug is in IA or the Windows Installer, but my guess is it is IA. Hope there is a solution soon, because my vendors are spoiled on the look of my new installations which are not possible in setup tools.

[elecuyer]

I had a similar problem in IA 7 r2 (that was not present in previous releases) where the install script would hang indefinitely at the "Windows Installer" message...

In my case, this bug occurs when you attempt to assign the value of a variable to itself.
i.e.:
COMMANDVAR = $COMMANDVAR$

~InstallAware Clipboard Data~
~Set Variable~
~{E43F84AF-D543-474E-8D7E-C93E15D97D11}~
~COMMANDVAR$MYAH$MYAH$FALSE~
~$COMMANDVAR$~

Not a particularly intelligent thing to do in code, but completely valid.

The back-story is that when I was first composing this script, I was trying (unsuccessfully) to pass IA command line parameters to set variables. I later backed out of this, but this line was left in tact from my experiments. The script only started to manifest this bug in 7.0r2 - it had been fine in 6.x and 7.0.

I'm passing this along to other IA users via this forum, since I have found reading other's messages and responses quite helpful. (IA Support was unable to isolate the problem on their own; nor were they able to provide a copy of 7.0 (without r2) for me to use in the meanwhile.)

-Ed Lecuyer
Build/Release Engineer
Maptech, inc.