Demo deletes itself when install is almost finished

[Warlokk]

OK, this is really annoying, and the weirdest thing I've ever seen an installer do.

I was in the closed beta, and had no problems installing or running the beta or any of the patches.

I downloaded the demo from both Fileplanet and Gamespot, both do the same thing. The installer acts normally all the way through, even taking forever to start like everyone else's. Once the DoW installer screen comes up, the progress bar moves along nicely as the files are copied onto the drive, I can even see the folder get created and all the stuff get put in it while the installation runs if I open Explorer and watch it.

Once the grey bar is all the way at the end, it says Publishing Product Information or something like that, then the installer closes instantly, and the entire "Dawn of War DEMO" folder is deleted. I've tried it 8 times now, with a reboot in the middle and shutting down most of my security software.

I have WinXP SP2, 3.5gb free on my Windows drive, and 19gb free on my game drive, and 1gb of RAM, and the beta ran great, so it's not my hardware. I've never seen anything like this. Any ideas? I'd really like to see what they've done since the beta. I even uninstalled the beta just in case the demo had a problem coexisting with it, but it didn't help. I also manually deleted all THQ and Dawn of War registry entries before running the installer, no change.

Oddly enough, the Event Log in Windows says the installation is successful. I've been a PC tech for quite a few years, and I haven't seen anything quite like this, especially on my own machine. Any ideas?

[ÜberJumper]

VERY strange.

Anything on google about it? Installshield's site? Are you making the desktop shortcut? Opening the readme? Perhaps if you don't click finish at the end, you can simply copy the folder to a different location?

[Warlokk]

Nope on all counts... figured I'd post it here first, see if there was something I was missing... I don't even get to the point where I have a Finish button to click, the installer just shuts down when the status text says "Publishing Product Information" or some such.

I'll do some poking around on Google and see if there's anything about InstallShield self-destructing, but I've installed plenty of stuff with InstallShield before and never had a problem. VERY strange is right.

Update: I searched Installshield's website, the only thing similar they had listed was installs hanging at 99 or 100%, and the fix was to change the path to the TEMP directory in Windows to something shorter... tried that, no good. So I'm about out of ideas...

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Ummm... you'd think it would say installation unsuccessful if it were something with the registry.

[Tranj]

Nope on all counts... figured I'd post it here first, see if there was something I was missing... I don't even get to the point where I have a Finish button to click, the installer just shuts down when the status text says "Publishing Product Information" or some such.

I'll do some poking around on Google and see if there's anything about InstallShield self-destructing, but I've installed plenty of stuff with InstallShield before and never had a problem. VERY strange is right.

Update: I searched Installshield's website, the only thing similar they had listed was installs hanging at 99 or 100%, and the fix was to change the path to the TEMP directory in Windows to something shorter... tried that, no good. So I'm about out of ideas...
The thing that happens right after the "Publishing Product Information" is that it opens the readme. Can you try and open notepad just to check that it's not been corrupted? I know I'm reaching here, but we have not seen this. I'll have our QA team try and recreate this as well. Have you tried leaving the desktop icon and readme options unchecked?

OK...saw that you don't even get to the checkboxes...

[Warlokk]

Nope, Notepad is fine... I even was taking a look at the ini files in the install temp directory for some pathing info, just digging for a clue. And nope, not a checkbox in sight, never gets that far.

Interestingly enough, it is also deleting the temp directory created by the installer when it shuts down... so obviously the installer is running into some sort of error, but it's not posting any error messages at all, it's just shutting down and cleaning up after itself.

I just really don't get why I'm having so much trouble here... the beta worked great... all my other stuff works fine... it seems like it has to be some sort of InstallShield error.

Incidentally the only option I'm changing in the install is the directory... I'm switching it from the C: drive it defaults to to D:\THQ\Dawn of War DEMO\. However I did try a few times in the default folder, and got the same result, so that's not it either.

I did recently install SP2, and I think this is the first game I'm trying to load since... but I'm sure a lot of these other folks have SP2 also. Maybe I'll try reinstalling the beta, just to see if that still works.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Maybe there's some existing registry keys screwing it up.

[Warlokk]

Thought that too, so I went in and deleted every registry entry referring to Dawn of War, THQ, DoW_Demo, anything else I could think of. No luck. Did this several times actually to clean up the stuff left behind from the failed install, too.

The beta just installed fine, but I see it used the WISE Installer, not Installshield.

[InvaderZim]

InvaderZim to the rescue (kind of)

QA people, I would enable MSI logging and check for a custom action failing. One of the DLL InstallShield uses has an uninitialized variable in it that was magically set to 0 on SP1 but since the process memory has shifted it is no longer set to zero but is some random value. This causes issues. We hit this problem with a few game installers using InstallShield during our testing for SP2. I have not investigated this to see if it is the same issue but it looks a lot like it. We patched the ones we found but you guys released your demo to late and apparently didn't test the installer on SP2 either. Silly QA team.

Here is a work around for those with the know how or the guts to try it. The stuff the installer is doing after it copies the files is of little value to you. So what if you don't get an uninstall string in the registry or a shortcut in the start menu folder. The only way to easily (relatively speaking) work around this issue is to kill the idriver.exe process before it hits the error.

1. Start the install and wait for the UI to show up.
2. Find the PID for the idriver process using taskmanger.
3. attach a debugger to the process "ntsd -p <PID>" example: ntsd -p 1332
4. enter "g" into ntsd to allow the process to continue.
5. Go through the wizard until the files start to copy.
6. Set focus to the ntsd window and get ready to break in.(Make sure your ntsd window isn't covering up the filenames being copied because the window won't redraw after you break in)
7. When the progress bar for the file copy gets to the end (or really close to it) press Ctrl+C to break into the debugger.
8. Check the file name it stopped on. If it is in system32 or somewhere outside of the games install folder you can go to step 9. You don't need the MFC and other files it is installing onto your box since SP2 has newer versions of them anyways. If it is still copying a file in the game folder you need then use the sleep command to let the process continue for a short time ".sleep 100" (100 milliseconds) and check the filename again.
9. enter "q" into the debugger to quit (kill) the installer.

If any of that didn't make since to you or left you with a bad feeling in your stomach then just pretend the problem has no solution and go play something else.

You will get a message box saying the setup failed but at least the files will still be there and you can play the game. I did this and played the tutorial with no problems.

I am Zim!!!

[Warlokk]

Well alrighty then! I'm not familiar with the progs you listed, but as a professional software and hardware troubleshooter and tech, I think I can probably give it a go... for now though I must sleep, work awaits in the morning. It sounds like it should work fine, because all the files are there and it looks ready to go right before the installer chokes and deletes everything. Your explanation makes perfect sense to me.

I'll give it a shot tomorrow, and post how things turn out. I hope this helps the devs iron out any last minute bugs.

All this trouble for a demo... were it any other game, and were I not in the beta, I would've said "F--- it", deleted it and probably not bought it. Looks like I'm one of the few having this issue though, unless nobody's posting about it.

[ani]

That looks, uh, kinda dodgy.

*edit, if it works fair play, just kinda looks, yeah...

[InvaderZim]

Well, even if it is a different bug then the one I mentioned it wouldn't be the game developers fault. They rarely put together the install packages, as you can tell since the beta used a different one. This type of bug is very common when you rearrange the process memory layout from what it was when the application released (in this case InstallShield) and the QA people can't find this type of bug without running tools against the code at compile time (which we strongly recommend but few places do yet) since it works on their OS at the time they are testing it. So don't blame the devs of the game (for the demo installer anyways). I wouldn't even blame InstallShield, I have seen many poorly written applications doing many really bad things. InstallShield is a very well written application and they have great tools. Their stuff looks like the perfect software when held up to others (which shall remain nameless)

Zim needs no vacation!

[Bravus]

while installing the game creates a temporary folder on your C: harddisk where it unpacks the data first.
you need to have about 1GB of free space on your C: partition, otherwise the installer will shut down and delete the (unfinished) installation. don't know if that's why you can't install, but freeing some space on C: solved it for me

[asmodeus5150]

Warlokk, you are not alone with this strange occurance after SP2 installation and it's not just this game for me. I have tried: Command and Conquer Generals, Tribe Vengence beta, and The DoW demo all get completely through the install process to find out that only an empty directory were the program should be. I uninstall SP2 to see if it would work then, well, all 3 programs installed and worked fine even after reapplying SP2 behind the installs. So, it's very strange and I've google searched high and low for an answer to this to no avail.

[InvaderZim]

asmodeus5150 has confirmed that this is a SP2 issue. Looking at the MSI logs I found these lines near the bottom. It invokes a few custom actions just before this as well.

Action ended 1:43:58: InstallFinalize. Return value 2.
...
Action start 1:43:58: ISCleanUpUserTerminate.
...
MSI (c) (F4:5C) [01:43:58:953]: MainEngineThread is returning 1602

The MSI error 1602 is "The user cancels installation." It looks like the InstallFinalize action is returning 2 instead of 0 and triggering a cancel code path.

Zim sleeps now.

[Warlokk]

Zim-- Worked like a charm, I installed it this morning before I left for work. Thanks for the tip! DAMN that intro video is awesome!

How widespread is this SP2-Installshield issue? Why does there not seem to be much on the 'net about it yet? SP2's been out for a while now, are people just not installing it yet, or is it that the latest batch of new games hasn't hit the shelves yet... this could be a nightmare for a lot of companies' support staffs.

[Randell]

I've got no idea, since SP2 I've been unable to install Doom3, Tribes Vengeance beta or this DoW demo, and no one is complaining about it!!!

[InvaderZim]

Glad it worked for you. To uninstall just delete the folder and the start menu folder.

It is an InstallShield issue that I know they are aware of and have probably fixed by now. The apps that came out right around when SP2 was finished are the only ones that you need to worry about. InstallShield has it fixed and the older installers that hit the issue for popular applications were patched. It was not a very wide problem anyways, most InstallShield MSI packages just copy files and write to the registry and therefore do not hit this issue.

SP2 is just now getting wide distribution now that Windows Update has been released.

[Warlokk]

Surprise Surprise, the exact same bug is still in the retail release... I hope this same workaround method will work, I'm pretty sure it will... :P

[Randell]

yeah I had to uninstall SP2 to get the game to install. What is wrong with these people.

[Davor]

Wierd, I've got SP2 and had no trouble at all installing.

[CruiserCarrier]

I've been dying to try this game and I have the EXACT same issues you guys are having. It appears to be SP2 causing the fixes.

I have been unable to install the following demos:

Rome: Total War
Tribes: Vengeance
Warhammer 40k

ALL the demos act up in the same way. Namely, they nearly finish installing and then completely self-terminate. I'm especially interested in Warhammer and Rome, yet I can't install them. It must be an SP2 issue, has others have reported and gotten similar issues that were not present when they uninstalled SP2. Anyone know a workaround?

[God's Hitman]

yep blame it on SP2. i had the exact same problem recently and managed to fix it by uninstalling SP2. just a question, i read somewhere that after i uninstalling SP2, i can reinstall it and expect the problem to be gone. is this true?

[Angules]

I wanted to see if it was true that SP2 was guilty for these installing problems. Well, i installed SP2 and now the demo wont install on my computer either.

What i want to ask is, how do i uninstall SP2 from my computer? I am having some problems with finding it on my comp. :err:

[God's Hitman]

i uninstalled it by going into control panel and then Add or Remove Programs. you should be able to find it there ;)

[Angules]

Actually that is what i'm having problems with. I cant find it anywhere on the Add/Remove programs list.

[Randell]

I couldn't install the demo or the Total War Demo or the Tribes Vengeance Beta or Doom3 retail. I couldn't uninstall SP2 it would stop uninstalling during the process. I had to do a repair reinstall of XP to get it to pre SP2 so I could install all the above.

However I reinstalled SP2 beleiving that no one would be stupid enough to issue the game with the same installer/sp2 problem..sigh.

I had to uninstall SP2 again.

[KOKOtm]

Still no update for this issue?