Undefined MSI background behaviour

[Armin Linder]

Hi everyone,

doing unattended setups I call a sequence of several .msi based setups
via a batch file. While generally all of them work OK, I experienced a
strange behavious with one of them which returns prematurely to the
calling batch, i.e. before the setup has actually finished. There is
still an instance of msiexec.exe on the task list, and the
installation processds for almost half a minute before it is actually
done. This breaks my sequence of installations. Right now I put a 30
seconds wait loop into my batch, which is far from an elegant
solution.

Is there any way to influence the background behaviour of msi packets?
Is this normal behaviour at all? I flipped tons of pages in the MSDN
docs, but could not find any hint that there was such a behaviour with
msi files.

Thanks

Armin Linder

 

[Stefan Hotan]

Sounds to me like a asynchronous 'no wait for completion'
custom action is launched. This is not faced often but it
can be part if a windows installer process.

Did you try the START /WAIT command line option? Maybe it
can solve your problem. Or you could change the custom
action by using a transform file for that installation.

Stefan Hotan
Windows Installer Consultant
www.windowsinstaller.ch