MSI installer not correctly uninstalling a product

Question

I have a situation where a user can install an older version of my software for the 'current user', and then go ahead and upgrade to a newer version of my software for 'all users'.

The product itself works fine after this, but the strangeness happens on uninstall.

When I try to uninstall the product, the uninstaller shows a couple flashes of progress and then simply dies. It calls none of my custom actions at all (of which i have for install, uninstall, and commit. The product files remain, and I can still launch it.

If I try to uninstall again, MSI gives an error saying that the product doesn't exist, but it is still indeed listed on add/remove programs.

After this attempted uninstall, the user can work around the problem by uninstalling the 'rest' of the product through add/remove programs (which at this point shows the older version of the product).

Any Idea what could cause this?

Besides, who created the MSI? Visual Studio or WiX, or something else. — Lex Li
Was created in visual studio. With the amount of strange problems and custom action coding I've had to do, I'm getting tempted to simply move to WISE... — Ben

Prashant Prashant · Accepted Answer · 2010-05-06T20:48:42

It could be because of some exception thrown internally. It is hard to say. You could get the logs from user by asking him to uninstall in the following manner -

msiexec {product code} /xlv Logfile

This would help to debug the problem and narrow it down.

MSI installer not correctly uninstalling a product

1 Answers