VS2005 Setup project - program asks for installation media when started for the first time by another user

I have a very simple VS2005 deployment project that aims to install for all users on a PC.

All the application files are written to %Program Files%\MyProg. A shortcut is created in the start menu and the startup folder. No registry settings or anything else are created. I have set 'InstallAllUsers' to true.

The created MSI runs fine and installs the software. It works without any problems when running under the user acc开发者_高级运维ount from which it was installed.

When logging in as another user, the start menu and startup icons are present. It attempts to launch the application however an installation window pops up and states that 'the feature you are trying to use is on a network resource that is unavailable.' The installer will only proceed if pointed to the original MSI file.

Why does this happen? I want my application to be installed completely for all users when it is installed by a single user.

edit: Solution

I was getting similar event log messages as shown on this page. In my case it turned out to be as simple as ensuring that the User's Program Menu had its 'AlwaysCreate' attribute turned to false. If it was true, windows would try and recreate the folder when a new user logged in. This somehow required the invocation of the installer and thus resulted in the 'please insert the installation media' prompts.

It is actually kind of hard to say without some more information. I would recommend checking on the rights in the installed folder (seeing if only the one who installed it has rights) and also checking the file list for the directory (to make sure VS didn't automatically place some files in the user profile). Let me know what comes out from those two steps and we can try to keep digging if that didn't shed any light on it.

Keep in mind chances are this is most def not specific to Visual Studio, look at this MS support article here where the same message is coming back for office.

I know this is an old post but I thought I'd add another cause and solution in case the above didn't work for you.

There is a bug in VS Setup and Deployment Projects which results in registry values being entered into HKCU instead of HKLM irrespective of the InstallAllUsers property being set to true.

You must use Orca msi editor to change the registry root for "DesktopFolder" and "ProgramMenuFolder" from either 1 or 2 to -1. The issue cannot be resolved via VS.

http://www.qa.downappz.com/questions/vs-2010-deploys-per-user-features-during-install-which-require-access-to-install-media.html