Saturday, 23 August 2008

When InstallShield executes the wrong installer

I recently had an issue where attempting to install one application would actually invoke the installer of another. More specifically, I was trying to install Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 and the InstallShield installer was (after performing some processing of it's own) launching the Belkin Wireless G InstallShield installer. This is infuriating as it prevents the installation of Adobe Reader.

Well, after a bit of faffing I finally found the solution.

It would appear that the Belkin InstallShield installer is either creating or modifying a registry setting at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\Setup. The default value for that key was the Belkin installer. I simply deleted the entire "Setup" key. The Adobe Acrobat installer then works a dream and the Belkin nonsense is removed.

I would imagine that this issue is down to InstallShield rather than Belkin (although they may have written a crappy InstallShield script) as there are numerous other accounts of InstallShield executing the wrong installer. So hopefully this fix should work for all of them.

Enjoy :-)

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