Uninstall Previous Per-User Install In Per-Machine Scope?

[NoMoreFood]

When running interactively, I want my installer to remove a previously-installed per-user exe-based application but it is not executing as expected. MSIEXEC returns error 1721 in a verbose log indicating the package is bad. Any ideas how to accomplish this or what I am doing wrong?

https://github.com/windirstat/windirstat/blob/master/setup/WinDirStat.wxs

[robmen]

Would need to see a verbose log file.

[NoMoreFood]

Here is it.

Output.log

[robmen]

It turns out the log file wasn't necessary, but seeing it helped illuminate the problem. Your CustomAction element uses the Property attribute.

<CustomAction Id="DoUninstallHKCU" Property="UninstallHKCU" ExeCommand="[WIN_DIR_STAT_HKCU] /s"
              Execute="immediate" Impersonate="no" Return="ignore"/>

Per the documentation for CustomAdction Property it specifies the executable to be executed:

This attribute is also used with the ExeCommand attribute to create a type 50 custom action that uses the value of the given property to specify the path to the executable.

That means the value of the Property UninstallHKCU is used as the executable to launch. However, there is no UninstallHKCU Property in your code. So the custom action is executing the "" program and passing the arguments "path to the uninstaller" and /s to it.

The fix should be easy.

<CustomAction Id="DoUninstallHKCU" Property="WIN_DIR_STAT_HKCU" ExeCommand="/s"
              Execute="immediate" Impersonate="no" Return="ignore"/>

Now, it should execute the searched "path to the uninstaller" and pass the /s argument to it.

PS: I don't often answer questions here with this much detail (too busy with customers), but I've used WinDirStat with great success in the past. Thank you for your contributions to it.

PPS: The above is a good example of support offered to FireGiant customers.

[NoMoreFood]

@robmen Thank you much for the advice and for your WinDirStat patronage! What you provided worked for when I updated the registry value to not be double quoted which is much further than how far I gotten. Since I didn't know how to make it strip the quotes, I saw that I can use Directory attribute instead with ExeCommand so I updated the code and it seems work. If you don't mind, could you validate I'm not doing completely inadvisable?

Update: Now I just need to figure out how to make it work consistently when the MSI is launched from a non-privileged context.

Thanks!

[NoMoreFood]

I ended up pushing execution through CMD which seemed to address the UAC conflict that was coming into play.

[robmen]

I can see using Directory instead to work around the lack of Windows Installer support for quoted paths in Property (I forget about that limitation). I guess I can kinda' see how the cmd workaround would work, but I'd use WixShellExec since that'd be cleaner all the way around.

[NoMoreFood]

Thank you; I will look into that.