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Pin to start menu

Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2010 9:07 am
by justminime
Huston weve get a problem...


When i choose to pin to start menu on windows xp and run the setup once everything works great...
When i run the setup again upgrade i get to see the shortcut and and an exe file.

you can see in the attached that their prperties is diffrent (sorry for the ugly arrows)
i made only the first short cut, the second appeared after reinstalling
you can reproduce it by building a program and choosing to pin it to start menu, run it, compile it again ( to create an update) and run it again.

How can i solve this?

Re: Pin to start menu

Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2010 12:55 pm
by CFConner
You need to remove the shortcut on uninstall (upgrade) then allow the upgrade to put it back. For me, I have the "Previous version uninstallation" shows up when I upgrade and it removes everything properly then installs the update.

Perhaps you want to do a patch instead?

=-Chris

Re: Pin to start menu

Posted: Tue Sep 21, 2010 2:09 am
by justminime
Hi Chris

I made the simplest default setup, one pinned file .
all the default values include pr requisets uninstall (did not touch a thing) it asked to uninstall in order to upgrade and after uninstalling there was still an image of the icon in start menu... not leading to anything and not shown in any file.

strange but it is really easy to reproduce...
and i dont want to use patch... I prefer to know the user has all the latest files....

thanks for the reply

Erez

Re: Pin to start menu

Posted: Tue Sep 21, 2010 11:13 pm
by mills
I've reproduced this. It appears that the problem is with (Un)Install MSI. Apply Uninstall appears to remove the pin properly.

Re: Pin to start menu

Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2010 1:43 pm
by mills
I found that these pinned shortcuts are being handled by registry:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Start Page

It turns out that pinning to start menu is not something that's supposed by Windows Installer (thus the problem appears when you run (Un)Install MSI), but it is integrated into Apply Changes.

You could possibly write a DLL that edits the registry to have the pin removed.
http://www.appdeploy.com/messageboards/ ... ey=&#21051