Long delays removing shortcuts

[BobbyNB]

Hi,
I have a problem that has just started. On uninstall, removing each shortcut takes nearly a minute. This is from the uninstall log...

RemoveShortcuts: Shortcut: Prompter
MSI (s) (B4:C0) [09:58:47:064]: Verifying accessibility of file: Prompter.lnk
MSI (s) (B4:C0) [09:58:47:064]: Using source file security for destination.
MSI (s) (B4:C0) [09:58:47:065]: Note: 1: 2318 2: C:\Config.Msi\48982f1.rbf
MSI (s) (B4:C0) [09:59:39:616]: Executing op: SetTargetFolder(Folder=23\NewsBoss XLE\System\)
MSI (s) (B4:C0) [09:59:39:619]: SHELL32::SHGetFolderPath returned: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs

Note the delay in there from the "Note:" line to the "Executing" line.

This repeats for each shortcut (15 of them) so the uninstall is taking too long.

Any idea what this means and what may be causing the delay. I have just upgraded from AI 15.9 to 16.4.1 - but I've also recently upgraded to latest Windows 10 Version 10.0.18362 Build 18362. I've tested on two PCs (both Win 10 upgrades as shown). Not tested on any other PCs or outside my domain.

Thanks, Bob

[Catalin]

Hello Bob,

This is strange, indeed.

I have tested this scenario, but I was not able to reproduce the issue. The shortcuts were removed in a timely fashion (according to the log file, in less than a second).

In order for me to further investigate this, could you please create a sample project which reproduces this issue and send it over (together with a download link for the resulted setup) by e-mail at support at advancedinstaller dot com?

Best regards,
Catalin

[marnix]

Hi,

we are a software vendor and use Advanced installer for all our installation kits.
We keep running into this issue when it can take up to 30 minutes to remove shortcuts.
There is not much to find on the internet about this.
msiexec seems to run in circles when this is happening. We used procmon to try and determine what is going on...but no luck so far
99% of customers do not have this problem.
When it happens it can take anywhere from 1 minute to 30 minutes to get past that point.

Anyone any ideas?

[Catalin]

Hello and welcome to our forums,

Unfortunately, I can not say for sure why this is happening.

Are you able to constantly reproduce this on your end? From what I can see, this only happens on your dev machines and not on your customers' machines.

If possible, could you please try testing this on clean VM and let me know if this still reproduces?

Best regards,
Catalin

[marnix]

FYI,

we figured out how to get out of this issue.
This happened at some of our customers and on one of our development systems.
It was also happening to a lesser extend on my station.

The trigger seems to be that there are too many programs pinned to the window taskbar. msiexec must have some kind of bug.
Either remove the pinned items or login as another admin use which has no pins and uninstall
We tried both and it works fine.

I found someone online who said that helped. On the developers machine it went down from 30 minutes to a few seconds after he removed the pins.
Mine went from about 1 minute to a few seconds as well. I only had 7 items pinned to my taskbar

[Catalin]

Hello,

Thank you very much for your followup on this.

Wow, I'm actually amazed that's the culprit here. I will for sure add this to my knowledge base for further reference.

I would have never thought this is actually happening because of the pinned items from the taskbar.

I have sometimes noticed that our installer itself takes a little bit longer on my machines where I have over 20 items pinned, but I would have never guessed the culprit - Windows Installer (msiexec) sometimes works in mysterious ways . I will try to run some more tests to see whether I can confirm this behavior or not.

Best regards,
Catalin