I sincerely doubt it. What I believe is happening (based on several days of "experimentation" about 3-4 years ago) is that at some step in the installation process, a Service (such as the Variable Engine service) is updated, so it is first stopped, removed, but somehow not "registered" or whatever "magic" has to happen for Windows to "see" it.
I further suspect that installations that say "You must restart your machine to complete the installation" include these situations of replaced services. I think while it might be easy to stop and remove a Service while Windows is running, getting one fully "hooked in" and started may need to be done as part of Windows' initialization process. Indeed, when I first ran into this issue, I was installing the earliest version of LabVIEW (2011?) that had the "Setup" utility on DVD1 and asked you to "choose everything you want to install". Sure enough, after one step, a Service was stopped, and subsequent steps never restarted it, nor did the final Restart. The "fix", I discovered, was to install a single component at a time, with a reboot between every step -- this got the deleted Services back.
For this reason, when NI suggested a Repair on my multi-version NI Platform (and I didn't realize how many DVDs would be involved), I figured it couldn't be that bad (and, in truth, it wasn't, just tedious and a little frustrating ...). In this case, however, I want to "turf to NI" and let them chew on it, at least to confirm my observation and examples that it is a bug.
BS
