Start-ADTMsiProcess detects non-installed app?

The Toolkit General Discussion
1

When I first called PSADT, it installed the app (Adobe After Effects) quite happily. Then I uninstalled the app (no longer appears in Control Panel), rebooted and attempted to run it again and it keeps detecting the app? In fact, I even have a Uninstall-ADTApplication in the Pre-Install phase and it did not detect the application.

What could be causing this?

PSADT
PSADT1817×310 56.8 KB

2

Run Get-ADTApplication -Name After* as this will show the app listing in the system’s ARP (Add/Remove Programs) registry table. I’d say there’s some stale remnant from a previous install hanging around.

You should also be able to do Get-ADTApplication -Name After* | Uninstall-ADTApplication, which will work if it’s an MSI. Please do take care of as this will uninstall anything starting with the word After, so see what’s there first!

3

Thanks @mjr4077au ! You are right, it did find a stale installation (from the previous run and uninstall) and it spit out this UninstallString:

MsiExec.exe /X{6DA43622-D968-4016-B442-1B45CA4F97BA}

When I manually ran it, it removed the stale instance and allowed the install to proceed.

However, this now makes me wonder:

  1. I’ve never installed AFX on this PC before except when I ran PSADT. So that means the stale instance could’ve only resulted from me calling the Uninstall-ADTApplication -Name ‘After Effects’ when testing the uninstall phase.

  2. Why does Uninstall-ADTApplication, which I always call during Pre-Install phase to make sure I remove all previous versions before installing the current one, not detect and remove the stale instance given that the UninstallString does work?

4

It’s hard to say without seeing your pre-install setup. Whatever input you’ve given the app must have been too specific and it didn’t find this hidden/stale bit of install data (which looks like the MSI that the admin console builder makes, not the product MSI).

5

I feel your pain - I suspect this may just be one of those Adobe quirks, as Adobe App installs are never quite what they seem…

We tend to refer to Adobe as :poop:dobe here, 'cause the way they have designed their software installer seems like it was never quite ported from Apple to Windows all that well and they chose not to use any other ‘industry standard’ method of installing Software onto a Windows machine, (depending on the licence level you have) you may have to install the app via an EXE (which actually triggers an MSI install) rather than being able to use the MSI included in the package :exploding_head:
as an example, the uninstall for After Effects v22.x was:

"%SystemDrive%\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\Adobe Desktop Common\HDBox\Setup.exe" --uninstall=1 --sapCode=AEFT --baseVersion=22.0 --platform=win64 --deleteUserPreferences=false

Don’t get me wrong, I do get it, they wrote a single uninstaller that allows them to standardise the install / uninstall each of the Adobe Creative Cloud apps using a standard format --sapCode = Application baseVersion = (Base) Product Version. It’s just they have gone to the effort of making it harder for admins to maintain - added to which their products are always released as the whole new (enormous) package (multiple GBs) rather than issuing a small patch to fix an issue (in the MBs) as most other vendors do :face_with_steam_from_nose:

Why do they have to reinvent the installation wheel and make this so hard :man_shrugging: