InstallAware

Hi folks,

I'm hoping someone has seen this before.

I've been charged with the task of of testing our software for group policy deployment, as we have several clients that are interested in this feature. One client in particular recieves 4 of our packages. I was testing group policy deployment with all 4 of them on three WinXP machines.

I logged into each workstation simultaneously, and noticed that the installations had not entirely finished. The process explorer was showing moderate CPU usage from multiple MSIexec processes. After about 10 minutes they stopped and went away, the start menu was finally populated and the software ran successfully. One of the packages failed, an event log entry stated "another installation was in progress". After another restart of the computers the 4th package installed just fine.

My observations have found:

1. The user is prompted to log in before the installation is complete. This does not occur on any other products (OpenOffice, MS Outlook, etc) we push out to our own users.
2. The installations are running in parallel with other installations. This should not be possible, and does not occur with any other package we have (OpenOffice, MS Outlook, etc).

My question is, what would be the source of this behaviour? Is it:
-The version of installAware we're using (currently v7 R2)?
-An aspect of the build script?
-Something else entirely?

Unfortunately I won't be able to provide much in the way of details of the build script. I'm the sys admin not the developer, but since this falls under Active Directory it's my job to explore this.

I can say that the building of the MSI is executed from a command-line script using ANT.

Any help is much appreciated.

The group policy MSI is non-blocking. Therefore when queuing setups, place the InstallAware setup in the last position after all other blocking setups.

You can also queue multiple InstallAware setups this way. Each will be non-blocking and they will patiently wait until the Windows Installer mutex is freed.