InstallAware

I have just been migrating from my old development machine (Vista Business SP2 32-bit) to a new one (Win 7 Ultimate 64bit). I have been having problems with building my installs in IA9 Studio edition. It seems to build the installer fine, however when I run the installer afterwards I get the error.

"Cannot start setup - the setup file may be corrupt, or you may have the wrong password.If you downloaded this file, please download a fresh copy. If the file is password protected, check your password and try again."

If I build from the same project on the my old Vista install, it builds fine and installs fine. I get no errors that I can see when I build in Win 7, the sometimes the resultant exe (this is a Compressed Web-based Exe build), is appreciably smaller (like 40MB instead of 50MB, but this is not always the case).

Are there changes that I need to note when moving to Windows 7 and 64bit. I would have assumed that I should be able to migrate without any changes.

Note that target systems for the install are not necessarily 64-bit, in fact most are 32-bit system, so I am not looking to target a 64-bit only install.

Any help would be appreciated.

Troy.

Compressed builds seem to be the problem. I have also tested using Windows 7 64bit as a VM on a laptop and the installations build fine so the issue seems confined to my development box.

No ideas anyone?

I have converted my old Vista install into a Vmware VM which I can run on the new machine, so I can still do the build my installs via that. However it would be preferable to be able to do on Windows 7 rather than having to fire up the VM everytime.

I have problems loading my projects that were developed under windows XP on my new windows 7 machine, complains about plugins for .net framework not being installed even though they are.

Could it be installaware IDE is having problems with windows 7 overall?

best regards

Not at all. Make sure you actually do have everything you need installed.

Yeah I am not getting any problems such as that, everything seems work fine, it's just that the builds are corrupt.

Upgrading to IA9 R2 hasn't fixed the issue for me either. For now I have to build my installs using my Vista VM.

Make sure you are on 9.08 or 9.09.

Installing 9.09 didn't make a difference, however I found a solution to the problem. I found that this problem could be fixed by disabling SMB2 on Windows 7 (the install builds were being created on a network drive). As a bonus, this also solved another problem I had with Office 2007 where it was taking 5 minutes to open documents over the network.

So now I don't have to rely on the VM to create my install builds. Yay.

Glad you were able to find a solution, Troy. Can you tell us a little more about what SMB2 is and how you went by disabling it?

SMB (which stands for Server Message Block) is the common protocol Windows uses for network file and printer sharing. It is explained here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Message_Block

SMB Version 2 was introduced with Windows Vista and is also used Windows 7 and Server 2008 (I think those 2 use Version 2.1). I have noticed there have been some issues since going to Windows 7, one relating to file corruption (when I was doing my IA builds), and the other with Office 2007 taking ages (about 5 minutes) to open files on our file server (a Server 2008 box). I found a couple of references to disabling SMB2 support either on the client (which requires running a couple of commands from an administrator run command prompt) or server (which requires a registry change). These are described in the following links.

http://www.caseware.com/support/casekno ... ta-windows

http://www.petri.co.il/how-to-disable-s ... r-2008.htm

In my case I followed the instructions in the first link to disable SMB2 on my client PC only. To quote from that article

Log onto the Windows Vista or Windows 7 workstation and open an Elevated Command Prompt. To do so:

1. Click Start | All Programs | Accessories.
2. Right-click on Command Prompt and select Run as Administrator.
3. The command prompt will open automatically.
4. Enter the following two commands exactly as shown. Note that after each equals sign (=) there is a space:

o sc config lanmanworkstation depend= bowser/mrxsmb10/nsi
o sc config mrxsmb20 start= disabled

Close the command prompt and reboot the workstation.

Note: To re-enable SMB2 at a future date, return to the Elevated Command Prompt by following these same instructions and enter the following two commands exactly as shown. Note, again, that after each equals sign there is a space:

o sc config lanmanworkstation depend= bowser/mrxsmb10/mrxsmb20/nsi
o sc config mrxsmb20 start= auto

Thanks a lot for the exhaustive analysis, that really helps!

So can I infer the following from your research:

- SMB2 affects not only InstallAware, but also Microsoft's own Office 2007
- This issue is resolved when SMB2 is removed

I will also ask R&D to evaluate what is going on with SMB2. Hopefully they'll be able to optimize InstallAware to work around this issue regardless.

Again, many thanks for the exhaustive analysis!

MichaelNesmith wrote:So can I infer the following from your research:

- SMB2 affects not only InstallAware, but also Microsoft's own Office 2007
- This issue is resolved when SMB2 is removed

Yes it did in my case. The strange thing is that it doesn't seem to occur on all machines. I have Windows 7 X64 running on a VM on my personal laptop, and I didn't get the problem with Install Aware there. Also one person has had the Office 2007 problem on their Vista machine, but no else in the office running Vista has that problem. Currently I am the only person in our office running Windows 7.

We are currently experiencing this issue when the installers are being compiled on a Win 2003 server, which doesn't support SMB2. Any ideas as to why this may be happening?

figo,

Is that a 64-bit Server 2003? Does this problem arise on any installer you build? What if you start from a basic setup and try to build that with no changes?

No it is not a 64-bit machine.

The server is as follows:
X86 Microsoft Windows Server 2003 SP2

I haven't tried with a sample app but I will keep trying to find a consistent process that causes this. So far the results are not predictable.