VAW Update Can Leave You With Nothing

[mkaec]

The way a VAW update works is that the existing version is removed and then the new version is installed. If everything goes well, then this works out fine. But, if something goes wrong, the uninstall part may succeed and the install portion may fail, leaving the user with nothing. Since VAW downloads the installer itself, the user might not know where it is to manually run it. I think it would be more user-friendly for the VAW installer to notice something went wrong, request to reboot the system and then automatically run the installer after the user logs back in after the reboot. I've had other applications do this and it works out well.

This has happened to me quite a few times. I tend to run Process Explorer on my systems and one of the APIs it uses seems to cause services to get stuck in a "pending delete" state when the VAW uninstaller tries to remove them. Then the installer can't install the services because they already exist. The installer bails out and VAW is gone from the system. I try to close Process Explorer before running VAW updates, but it is easy to forget. And if another user is running it in a disconnected session, there is nothing I can do.

[Dima P.]

Hello Marc.

Thank you for your post. I'll pass this feedback to our Setup team and we will investigate the described behavior.