Wix Installer Problem: Why does RestartManager mark Service as RMCritical and not RMService

Question

I\'m trying to prevent our wix installers from prompting the user for a reboot when uninstalling. Our services are set to be uninstalled and deleted on an uninstall. Unfor

Answer 1

You can suppress window's RestartManager by setting the MSI property MSIRESTARTMANAGERCONTROL= "Disable" (see documentation here - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa370377(v=vs.85).aspx). The only problem with this approach by itself is that instead of prompting users with a reboot-required dialog, they will see the file-in-use dialog (and be asked to shut down any applications that might be using those files/services). This dialog is displayed during the InstallValidate standard action of the InstallExecute Sequence.

If you want a sneaky way around either of these dialogs you can schedule a custom action before InstallValidate that manually shuts down any running services before the RestartManager has a chance to inspect the system. This does not follow standard MSI practices because normally you would mark a custom action that modifies the system as a 'deferred' action, but MSI doesn't allow any deferred actions to run before InstallValidate. So, you would have to mark the action as 'immediate', but in the code you would go ahead and modify the system by shutting down the services. The drawback here is that there's no such thing as an immediate rollback action, so if your uninstall/upgrade fails and does a rollback the services you stopped will be left in a stopped state. The upside is that users never have to see any additional dialogs during their uninstall/upgrade.