Windows 8 with an error viewing the network drive

Question

When I try to expand a network drive from the Browse button on the Select destination location I receive page refers to the location "this error is unavailable" (see the first screenshot), network drive Icons are also not displayed.

Network drive permissions allow all users to read / write access to the drive and other applications do not have the same problem (the dialog in the second screenshot was generated by a 32-bit application that calls the SHBrowseForFolder API).

The environment is Windows 8 (64-bit) with all updates from 16-Jul-2013 working as a VirtualBox 4.2.16 client. The setup was compiled with the latest version of Inno Setup (5.5.3 (a)).

The problem appears in both Samba and Windows. Windows 7 and XP do not have the same problem. I did not test its dedicated (not VirtualBox) Win8 PC.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

By default, Windows does not cache login credentials between elevated and failed processes. You entered the server and matched the drive letter as an un-elevated user; this is not available for an elevated process such as an installer.

You can set PrivilegesRequired=lowest in the [Setup] section to prevent the upgrade and keep network drives available; however, be aware that this will also prevent access to any places or functions required by the administrator on the local computer.

If you create a “clean” network installer (which does not install local files), you can also use settings such as Uninstallable=no . In addition, you can reverse engineer your installer to run locally on the server machine.

Answer 2

This problem annoyed me for a long time, until I found an easy solution:

In the registry, just set [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ System] "EnableLinkedConnections" = dword: 00000001

reboot and do with it.

Against the background and possible shortcomings read here and here

When it comes to Inno Setup, you can also follow this approach: Configure Inno Setup installer query privileges only when necessary . Especially when you do not want to ask clients to change this registry key. I do this and it works fine.