The message "This program may not be installed correctly" in Windows 7 RC

Question

I have an installer that works fine under NT 5.x, Vista, and Windows 7. It contains the appropriate manifest for UAC on NT 6.x.

But starting with Windows 7 RC, every time the installer closes, Windows displays an error message "This program may not be installed correctly", even if the program installed correctly without any problems. I have never received these false messages in Vista or in the beta version of Windows 7.

I sent a bug report to Microsoft but did not receive a response. I thought this might just be a crash on Windows 7 RC, but the problem still exists when I re-install one of the most recent RTM-escrow collections that were skipped. Microsoft has no documentation about this - not even a hint of what might have caused it.

Even more disappointing is the fact that I get the message "This program may not have been installed correctly", even if I canceled the installation on the very first screen, "You will definitely make sure you want to continue" before any installation code (creating a temporary directory , file extraction, copying, registry, etc.) is performed.

Has anyone figured this out?

Answer 1

Well, to answer my own question, I found a way to solve this problem. I noticed that the WinRAR change log indicates that the WinRAR automaker also suffered from the same problem and that it was resolved. So I downloaded the latest version of WinRAR and dropped it into the disassembler along with the earlier version, looking for new API calls, etc. In short, it turns out that all that has been done is to add to the manifest:

<compatibility xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:compatibility.v1"> <application> <!--The ID below indicates application support for Windows Vista --> <supportedOS Id="{e2011457-1546-43c5-a5fe-008deee3d3f0}"/> <!--The ID below indicates application support for Windows 7 --> <supportedOS Id="{35138b9a-5d96-4fbd-8e2d-a2440225f93a}"/> </application> </compatibility> 

Some documents appeared in some links to strings: apparently, this is something new that was added in Windows 7, and that the documentation for it was created on May 20. This did not help Microsoft not to link to this from any of their Win7 documentation pages, especially since it is noticeable. Sigh

Edit: This is poorly documented on MSDN here .

Answer 2

I came across the same error message when starting a new Qt based application. The same symptoms - get this "useful" message after closing .exe, regardless of what the program did.

Now I have various qt application projects, they are all built in exactly the same way. And none of the others does this.

Finally, I realized that this error was caused solely by the fact that I called this particular project an “installer”. I ended up with the binary "installer.exe", and that would no doubt have a project name embedded in it elsewhere (without delving into the project file created by qmake, it’s not entirely accurate).

The interesting thing is that you may run into this problem simply by having a project called "installer" and nothing more.

Answer 3

Have you dropped the Application Compatibility Toolkit in your installer?

I never had a reason to deal with this before, but it seems to be what it is intended for.