Enable Repair option in Programs and Featues/Add Remove Programs

Question

I've searched all over for a solution and have not been able to get them to work.

My company's product used to have the Repair option when selecting the product in the Programs and Features dialog. You could also right click on the product and select Repair there as well. Just before I inherited the installer projects, this Repair option disappeared. I looked around to see if anything was disabling this option and couldn't find anything.

In InstallShield DisableRepair is set to No. There also is no registry key set in the Uninstall section for the product for NoRepair when the product is installed. By default, I believe I should be seeing the Repair option and don't understand why it's not there. I've tried messing with ARPNOREPAIR in custom actions, all to no avail. I even created a registry key for NoRepair with both 0 and 1 for DWORD values to see if it actually would work and it did not. I'd like to say that there is some code somewhere that is disabling it, but I've checked everywhere and even talked to the previous installer coworker and he doesn't know of anything removing that option.

Does anyone have information on this?

Answer 1

After lots of digging around and testing I have found out some interesting things and a solution to my issue. It turns out that there was a C# custom action that was creating a separate registry entry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall. Also, ARPSYSTEMCOMPONENT was being set to 1 in InstallShield which was disabling the original entry from showing in Programs and Features, while the new entry was set to show. Apparently NoModify and NoRemove work with the new entry, but not NoRepair(no idea why this is). My solution was to go back to the original entry and modify the keys that I was adding in the custom action.