Uninstalling previous Adobe Readers
I have packaged, using Wise 5.01, Adobe Reader 7.0. Yeah, you’re not supposed to capture and MSI with an MSI but I am crazy that way. It works really well. Anyway, in our environment there are about 3 to 5 different versions of Reader, 5.0, 6.0, 6.02, etc. I do not have the original install MSI’s for these installations, I was not employed here at the time of deployment and know one seems to know where the source is, likely deleted. I have gone out to Adobe’s web site and finding the exact version of 6.0 has been troublesome, must have been "buggy". I was able to locate the uninstall strings in the registry and get the GUID’s needed to remove the installations. I used the “Upgrades†section of Wise and added the GUID’s well, just one for testing and installed it on the appropriate imaged machine. It failed to uninstall the previous version.
Has anyone had this experience, thinking about doing a WinBatch to facilitate this? [X(] Sorry for the length, there is more to tell but I am trying to make this short of quick.
Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Kevin
Answers (6)
I'm afraid you may have run into one of the primary reasons not to repackage an MSI. In order for Windows Installer to properly handle an upgrade the prior packages must all have matching GUIDs for each component. Placing the older package GUIDs in the upgrade table is only a small part of what is needed to generate a successful update MSI. If devliered from the vendor, the GUIDs should match and it is their problem to make sure they do. But if you have had to repackage the older legacy setups into MSI packages, or have repackaged the MSIs from Adobe- the GUIDs for all the components that make up the package will not match unless you took extra steps to make it happen (Wise offers UpgradeSync as a tool to do this). This means that when the next version from Adobe comes out, your repackaged v7 MSI will not be "upgraded" and you will be stuck doing what I think you need to do now- and that is scripting the removal of any existing version on your own. This could be done as a custom action deployed with your new Adobe package- but I would highly recommend that once you go through the effort of getting all of your old versions removed, that you work out whatever issues you are having with the vendor-provided MSI and work with that (you'll avoid problems in the long run if you tackle them now).
I think there are some other threads here discussing removing old versions of Adobe Readers (and look to the uninstall command lines you found in the registry), but for your Reader 7 package take a look at the link below:
http://www.itninja.com/link/installshield-tuner-7.0-for-adobe-acrobat
Best of luck,
Bob
Gary
For removing your previous versions, I'd probably go with the Winbatch too. You could parse the registry looking for each GUID, or just do Winbatch:
RunShell("msiexec.exe", "/x GuidForOlderReaderVersion1 /q", "", etc...)
RunShell("msiexec.exe", "/x GuidForOlderReaderVersion2 /q", "", etc...)
etc...
I think you could give it the GUID uninstall commands regardless of whether or not it's installed on that PC, and msiexec will ignore products that aren't installed. I'm not positive on that, but it's worth testing.
Good luck!
I ended-up just making my own MSI for distribution. Some of our packages are striaght installs of the vendors installation and others are PCUpDater packages. I have mine removing version 5.0, 5.05, 6.0 and 6.02 , seems to work OK so far.
This is the long way to do it but do a capture of all of the reader versions one after another on a clean build pc and save that cpature.
You can then make a Wisescript from that capture to check for existing keys and files and remove them as part the install. I told you this is the long way.
Also in your install make sure that you put in an unique key (ie HKCU\Software\[Your Organisation]\[Appversion] in your current user registry entries so that you can force an overwrite of the existing current user information.
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