Uninstall location

[Winsteps]

In Setup Factory 7.0 the default location for the Uninstall .exe is a sub-folder of the Windows folder.
%WindowsFolder%\%ProductName%\uninstall.exe

Is there any reason why I shouldn't change that to the Application folder?
%AppDir%\%ProductName%-uninstall.exe

[Adam]

A file cannot delete itself so if you put the file in %AppFolder% then after uninstall you will have left over folders and at least one file. By putting this file in %WindowsFolder% it allows the uninstall to remove all files/folders from %AppFolder%

Adam Kapilik

[Winsteps]

Thanks Adam. My concerns were because
1. special access privileges needed to put a file in %WindowsFolder% for some of my customers.
2. customers who uninstall by deleting %AppDir% won't delete the uninstall
3. multiple installations to different %AppDir% on the same computer will conflict with each other's uninstall files when using the default setting.

An orphan, missing or overwritten %WindowsFolder% "uninstall" sub-folder is likely to be more of a problem for my customers than an orphan %AppDir% folder.

Has anyone else encountered/solved these problems with uninstall routines?

How about a two-phase uninstall routine?
1. phase-1 and phase-2 are in AppDir
2. phase-1 copies phase-2 to the Temp directory
2. phase-1 launches phase-2
3. phase-1 terminates while phase-2 waits
4. phase-2 then uninstalls phase-1 and the original copy of phase-2 along with everything else.
5. phase-2 then terminates and sits in Temp waiting for a disk clean-up

[Adam]

1. special access privileges needed to put a file in %WindowsFolder% for some of my customers.

You are free to change this location. You could put this in any location on the users system. Unless this folder is specifically locked down an installer running with admin rights should be able to write here.

This is very common with installers. Look in that folder and you will most likely find other uninstall runtimes there.

2. customers who uninstall by deleting %AppDir% won't delete the uninstall

This is true. Most developers do not take this case into account since other things will not be removed if the user deletes the folder in Program Files (registry settings, shortcuts ect)

3. multiple installations to different %AppDir% on the same computer will conflict with each other's uninstall files when using the default setting.

This is not true. The uninstall configuration files are stored in %AppDir%. The only file that is in %WindowsFolder% is the uninstall runtime and will be shared amongst all SUF built installs.

Adam Kapilik

[Winsteps]

Thanks for the detailed response, Adam.

1. You wrote: "The only file that is in %WindowsFolder% is the uninstall runtime and it will be shared amongst all SUF built installs."

Exciting! Does this mean that if the user installs multiple different programs using SUF that the same uninstall runtime applies to them all? If so, I can scan the %WindowsFolder% subfolders to find out if the SUF uninstaller is already there for some other piece of software, and, if so, reference it. This will get round the "permission" problem for many users.

2. What about the "running the uninstaller from Temp" idea?