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What changed in Windows Installer (MSI) in Windows Vista Service Pack 1?

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Stefan Krueger met with us a few weeks ago for the Microsoft MVP Global Summit. Among the many topics we discussed was a suggestion from Stefan that we use the team’s blog to communicate relevant bug fixes that we make in our releases. This posting is the result of that suggestion. (Thanks, Stefan!)

 

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 was recently released and you may have noticed that the version of MSI on the system has incremented to 4.0.6001.18000. Below you will find a list of the most important issues that we addressed in Service Pack 1 and the SDK.

 

Updates that can be found in Windows Vista Service Pack 1:

 

· User Shortcuts in Redirected Start Menu Do Not Get Removed On App Uninstall

If you attempt to uninstall an application that was installed for a roaming user, you may receive error 1910 and the shortcuts from the start menu will not get removed.

· Win32_product does not work on vista when more than one per-user application is installed

Queries to the Win32_Product WMI class will fail if the machine has at least 2 per-user applications installed with a generic failure error.

 

Updates that can be found in the Windows SDK for Windows Server 2008:

 

· PatchWiz 4.0 ignores the IgnoreMissingSrcFile property

This property in the TargetImages Table is often used to reduce the time necessary to generate a patch, but the property was ignored in patchwiz 4.0 that was included in the Windows Vista SDK.

· Patchwiz 4.0 does not recreate the Patch table if dropped

Previous versions of patchwiz would automatically recreate critical tables (eg: Patch, PatchPackage) if they were dropped in the patch. Patchwiz 4.0 did not include this behavior, which caused failures in some cases.

· PatchWiz 4.0 does not support authoring of OptimizeCA MsiPatchMetadata property

The OptimizeCA property can be included in the MsiPatchMetadata of a MSP to restrict custom action usage and improve performance during patch application. Using this property with patchwiz 4.0 caused a build failure.

· PatchWiz 4.0 is unable to build patch for products with large number of files (>32767)

Previous versions of patchwiz supported building patches with a large number of files, but patchwiz 4.0 did not.

· Orca crashes when a transform is generated and a row is deleted from the current table

Orca crashes if the user attempts to generate a new transform and deletes a row from an existing table. (Using Orca, select New Transform, then delete a row from a table).

· ICE30 does not display all ICE errors

ICE30 only detects a subset of the total number of SFN/LFN collisions for components that contain files.

[Author: Tyler Robinson]
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. Use of included script samples are subject to the terms specified at https://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyright.htm.

Comments

  • Tyler
  • Anonymous
    June 01, 2008
    I know this is probably the wrong place, but I need to find out where to direct issues with Windows Installer. Basically we have an installer which works under WiX 2.0, and then broke under WiX 3.0.  But the WiX team are claiming that the error message is a validation done by WI itself, rather than being under their control. So to be able to switch to WiX 3, we first need WI to properly support what we're doing. Basically all we're doing is that there are some fonts we're shipping which we don't want to put in the system-wide Fonts directory.  Apparently this is worth an error, although I don't understand why. This form didn't let me put in an email, but it did let me put in a URL, through which you can trivially find contact info for a reply. Thanks in advance. :-(