Warning 1910. Could not remove shortcut

[redseujac]

Thank you very much for your answer and explanation.

I have tried your solution, but it does not work: desktop shortcut is removed but appears again, so not removed at all.

[Janderson]

I have played around with this problem a bit and discovered some things that may be useful.

At some point the public desktop directory was renamed from "Users\Public\Desktop" to "Users\Public\Public Desktop". I think this might be part of the error. When Advanced Installer runs the uninstaller during an upgrade or a normal install it looks like it can remove the users desktop shortcut but not a shortcut in Public Desktop. It does not have a problem removing from Public\Desktop on an old windows 7 install. It may be a misdirect or a problem with permissions. After an uninstall the shortcut will disappear from the desktop but upon a refresh will reappear when the one from Public Desktop is copied back to the users desktop. In my company's installers case we replace the desktop shortcuts with new ones with different names on each upgrade, this leads to multiple shortcuts showing up on the users desktop. This error appears to occur on all previous installers on an updated copy of windows 7. From other forums it appears that Advanced installer is not alone but I have found other installers that handle this issue more gracefully (installers used by Clone Drive, and LTspice). This appears to be an issue that will have to be fixed on the installer side. I am not sure how Advanced Installer is removing the shortcut and this may still very well be windows issue though.

I have attempted a workaround but without success. To hide the problem I attempted to use the remove resource tool to preemptively remove the desktop shortcuts before the uninstall step for both the current and previous versions. I am a little confused however on how to get the remove resource tool to do what I want. I have added it to the step before uninstall but cannot figure out what link to give it to remove the shortcuts in Public Desktop. If someone has more luck with this workaround I would appreciate any advice.

For now my company had decided to release an upgrade that does not replace the shortcuts by default. This hides the issue of multiple shortcuts but does not hide the error. Since the old shortcuts never actually get removed they link to the new exe but show the wrong version number. I hope that Advanced Installer or Windows will come up with a patch to fix this issue soon.

[Bogdan]

Thank you for your detailed feedback Janderson. We are still investigating on this, as you noticed the problem is present on a variety of installers so we suspect it is something from Microsoft, but we don't know yet what. When a solution/workaround is found an update will be posted by us on this thread.

Best regards,
Bogdan

[Bogdan]

While investigating this, I found some Microsoft references for possible solutions.

1) Please try to unregister and reregister Windows Installer on the machine:
- click Start, click Run, type MSIEXEC /UNREGISTER
- click Start, click Run, type MSIEXEC /REGSERVER,

2) Do you have an NVidia graphics adapter, as mentioned on this Microsoft forums thread?

Best regards,
Bogdan

[Janderson]

I have tried the MSIEXEC solution and it appears to have no effect on the issue.

I do have an NVidia graphics card and it looks like I received the nVidia - Graphics Adapter WDDM1.1 update. The other machine in my office that we could create this issue on also has an NVidia card. I uploaded screen cap of the updates I received around when this issue occurred in case it helps. It also looks like this update failed. I pasted the error for this update bellow. I have restarted several times since the update. I will play with it a little more Monday.

[evanw]

Hello,

I'm having the same problem as well. When I run the uninstaller, I receive the error message:

Warning 910. Could not remove Shortcut <MyAppName>.lnk. Verify that the shortcut file exists and that you can access it.

Usually the shortcut is still deleted, but I have observed a few occasions where the shortcut is not removed.

I took the advice presented in this thread and named my two shortcuts differently: my Program Files shortcut has a different name than my Desktop shortcut. However, the problem persists even with the files named individually.

Thanks,
Evan

[Bogdan]

Since we cannot reproduce this on our machine, after countless efforts, another approach is to see what happens in your files system, when the problem is reproduced.

To do that, please download the zip from this link, it contains the application "Process Monitor". Extract and launch the application, while Processor Monitor is running
run a setup package that reproduces the error until you finish, i.e. answer OK on the warning and finish the uninstall/upgrade. Then go to File -> Save in Process Monitor and export the log.

Send me the log at support at advancedinstaller dot com, mentioning this post. Also, very important, mention the exact name of the shortcut too, as it appears in the warning message.

The more logs the better, so don't hesitate. We know by now that this behavior appears mostly on Win 8 machines, and on a few Win 7. So it would be useful
if we could have logs for both OS-es.

Maybe analyzing each resource change from the OS allows us to see with more details what is the source of this warning.

Best regards,
Bogdan

[Igor Markovic]

I just wanted to let you know that we are also having this problem. Even with the Advanced Installer installation package itself. So I hope you'll be able to reproduce it yourself and come with a solution for this. Here some system information:

- Windows 7 64bit
- Advanced Installer: 9.8
- Windows ® Installer. V 5.0.7601.17514

It is the desktop shortcut that he is complaining about.

The weird thing is that I used procmon to see if the installer is trying to remove the file, but I cannot find any reference that an uninstall is also actually trying to remove the desktop item. During the installation I see in procmon that the desktop link is created in C:\Users\Public\Desktop. After uninstall (I first get a message during uninstall) the shortcut is still in C:\Public\Desktop. Also renaming the shortcut to a different name does not fix the problem.

[Bogdan]

Hi Igor,

I know about the Advanced Installer setup too, it was reported by one other user. But we almost all use Win 7 for development and testing and on none of the machines
the problem has appeared, nor on the new ones, running on Win 8.

I understand you saw no references in the logs from Procmon but would it be possible to send them to me too?

Best regards,
Bogdan

[numart]

We also have the problem. Thanks for letting us know about a workaround.

[Bogdan]

Hi,

I am back with more news. After a couple of hours of going through ProcMon logs with no success I started going back to searching for other developers on Google that encountered this problem. This way I found the following MSDN thread, with updated info about "desktop.ini" file.

The last two posts from there are relevant, it says the problem appears because of the "Read-only" attribute set for "desktop.ini" file from "C:\Users\Public\Desktop(Public Desktop)".

Note! To see the file "desktop.ini" you must change the Windows Explorer settings, to show system files.

I tested this "fix" and it seems to work. Why the file gets marked read-only I don't know, I guess this is something we must thank Microsoft for.

The solution is simple, I created a DLL custom action (new attached custom action) that runs on uninstall and removes the flag, if present. I attached a .zip containing the DLL file and a sample aip file created with version 9.8, so you can see the settings I used and implement them in your packages.

For those of you that don't have a maintenance plan to cover version 9.8 you can download and install it side by side, in trial mode, as you just need to open the project. After you finish you can uninstall it.

I am not 100% sure this is the problem, but so far I was not able to reproduce the problem at all and using this I got 100% success in all tests, on 4 different machines, so I assume this should do it. Feel free to let us know if there are still cases where this solution is not enough.

Also, I must let you know that this problem is reproduced on Vista too, if any of you have already reported that sorry, I must have missed it.

Best regards,
Bogdan

[mheckmann]

This works great, only thing is that a message window comes up:

"Please attach a debugger to rundll32.exe"

cheers
Markus

[Bogdan]

Sorry for that, I forgot it there while debugging the code. I uploaded a clean copy now, can you please try it again.

Best regards,
Bogdan

[mheckmann]

this works great! Thank you very much for this workaround!

cheers
Markus

[NBBob]

Thanks Bogdan for working this out.

I can confirm that removing read-only on the C:\Users\Public\desktop.ini before uninstall fixes the problem.

There may be a problem if the user is not an Administrator running the uninstall, but that does not affect our installer as it must run as Administrator.

Cheers
Bob