MSI installer not correctly uninstalling a product

Question

I have a situation where a user can install an older version of my software for the 'current user', and then go ahead and upgrade to a newer version of my software for 'all users'.

The product itself works fine after this, but the strangeness happens on uninstall.

When I try to uninstall the product, the uninstaller shows a couple flashes of progress and then simply dies. It calls none of my custom actions at all (of which i have for install, uninstall, and commit. The product files remain, and I can still launch it.

If I try to uninstall again, MSI gives an error saying that the product doesn't exist, but it is still indeed listed on add/remove programs.

After this attempted uninstall, the user can work around the problem by uninstalling the 'rest' of the product through add/remove programs (which at this point shows the older version of the product).

Any Idea what could cause this?

Answer 1

It could be because of some exception thrown internally. It is hard to say. You could get the logs from user by asking him to uninstall in the following manner -

msiexec {product code} /xlv Logfile

This would help to debug the problem and narrow it down.