“This program might not have installed correctly” message in Windows 7 RC

Question

I have an installer that works perfectly under NT 5.x, Vista, and Windows 7. It contains the proper manifest for UAC on NT 6.x.

But starting with Windows 7 RC, ever

Answer 1

Have you thrown the Application Compatibility Toolkit at your installer?

I've never had cause to deal with it before, but this seems like exactly what its intended for.

Answer 2

Well, to answer my own question, I've found a way to solve this problem. I noticed that the WinRAR changelog indicated that WinRAR's self-extractor also suffered from the same problem, and that it was solved. So I downloaded the latest version of WinRAR and threw it into a disassembler, along with an earlier version, looking for any new API calls, etc. Long story short, it turns out that all that it did was add the following to the manifest:

<compatibility xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:compatibility.v1">
  <application>
    <!--The ID below indicates application support for Windows Vista -->
      <supportedOS Id="{e2011457-1546-43c5-a5fe-008deee3d3f0}"/>
    <!--The ID below indicates application support for Windows 7 -->
      <supportedOS Id="{35138b9a-5d96-4fbd-8e2d-a2440225f93a}"/>
  </application>
</compatibility>

Some Googling of the strings turned up some documentation: apparently, this is something new that was added to Windows 7 and that the documentation for it was created on May 20. It didn't help that Microsoft doesn't link to this from any of their Win7 documentation pages, much less feature it prominently. sigh

Edit: This is documented, poorly, on MSDN here.

Answer 3

I ran into the same error message when running a new Qt based app I built. Same symptoms - would get this 'helpful' message after the .exe closed, no matter what the program did.

Now I have various qt app projects, all built the exactly the same way. And none of the others do this.

I finally figured out that this error was caused solely by the fact that I had named this particular project 'installer'. I had ended up with a binary 'installer.exe' and it would have no doubt had the project name built into it elsewhere (without delving into the qmake generated project file, not exactly sure what).

The point of interest is that you can run into this problem simply by having a project called 'installer' and nothing else.