nsis shortcuts not deleting after uninstall

Question

I am using nsis to create windows installers for my application. I've added shortcuts for the app and the uninstall.exe in startup menu and I delete them as part of uninstall, but the shortcuts are not deleted during uninstallation. Snippet of the install and uninstall code is as below:

section "install"
    createDirectory "$SMPROGRAMS\${COMPANYNAME}\${APPNAME}\"
    createShortCut "$SMPROGRAMS\${COMPANYNAME}\${APPNAME}\${APPNAME} Uninstall.lnk" "$INSTDIR\uninstall.exe"
    createShortCut "$SMPROGRAMS\${COMPANYNAME}\${APPNAME}\${APPNAME}.lnk" "$INSTDIR\app.exe" "" "$INSTDIR\logo.ico" 
sectionEnd

section "uninstall"
    delete "$SMPROGRAMS\${COMPANYNAME}\${APPNAME}\${APPNAME}.lnk"
    delete "$SMPROGRAMS\${COMPANYNAME}\${APPNAME}\${APPNAME} Uninstall.lnk"
    rmDir /r "$SMPROGRAMS\${COMPANYNAME}\${APPNAME}"    
sectionEnd

Can someone please help me with this.

Answer 1

Adding some details about which Windows version you are seeing this on etc. would help but I'm going to guess that this only happens on Vista and later . These versions of Windows have a compatibility shim that moves certain shortcuts to the all-users start menu.

To stop Windows from doing this you must mark the installer as UAC compatible, this can be done by adding the RequestExecutionLevel attribute to your script.