Outlook 2003 Add-in not working for all users

Question

I have an Outlook 2003 add-in written in Visual Studio 2008. All it does is display a msgbox when it loads. I am using a setup package to create me an msi for install

I have got the security caspol issue sorted. I have the PIA and the VSTO installed on the client. My setup is set to install for all users.

If I install it on a client machine it creates the HKCU registry hive and works perfectly for the installing user and appears in the COM add-ins dialog but doesnt work for any other user that logs in.

I changed the setup package to put the registry hive in HKLM and now it doesn't work for any user, including the installing user and it does not appear in the COM add-ins dialog.

What am I missing? I've read and re-read so much on the net it's starting to drive me crazy.....

Cheers in advance.

Answer 1

Newer versions of office don't read that HKCU key, Instead, they read this weird composite key under HKCU.

Misha Sneerson has a good article (with updates for 2010) here

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mshneer/archive/2007/09/04/deploying-your-vsto-add-in-to-all-users-part-i.aspx

Answer 2

Have you remembered to set the "InstallAllUsers" property in the setup project to true? This is pretty much undocumented, and I have just spent the last three days banging my head against exactly the same problem you describe until I noticed that I had overlooked this. Set it to "true" and now my project installas to all users :)

http://the-simple-programmer.blogspot.com/2011/02/deploy-visual-studio-2008-vsto-add-in.html