How to avoid program launch when installing

[Wim S]

Hello again

I started from scratch and created a new project, called Dummy. The only thing it does is showing a panel with a giant QUIT-button. The User Interface is quitted when you hit the Quit Button or when you click the little cross on the upper left corner of the panel. All c-code is generated automatically.

I created my distribution kit and installed it on my PC without any unwanted launches.

After that I started to adjust the Build Options, each time creating a new distribution Kit and installing it on my machine. Doing this, I found out that the unwanted behaviour started after I changed the output directory of my distribution kit (from cvidistkit.Dummy to Dummy Distribution Kit). Since the name of my project directory is Dummy, I changed the output directory from "Dummy Distribution Kit" to "Distribution Kit". Appearantly this solves the problem and the application is installed without any launches...

I suppose this is some kind of bug? Anyway, I found an easy workaround

[Mert_A.]

Hi Wim,

You have, in fact, stumbled across a very benign bug that in your particular case happened to cause your executable to be launched!  In case you're curious, I'll explain what is happening.  Twice during the installation (at exactly the times your application is run), the installer tries to run a simple utility (\supportfiles\nipie.exe), but the path is not enclosed in quotes, so the path that is actually run is something like "...\Dummy" instead of "...\Dummy Distribution Kit\Volume1\supportfiles\nipie".  In your case, this actually pointed to an existing file -- your application -- so it got run instead.  In most cases, this will not point to an existing file, so nothing will be run.

In most cases, not running the utility is okay, and it will actually be run successfully if the path to your setup.exe does not contain spaces (ie if it is something like d:\setup.exe).  The application being launched was not actually the one installed; rather, it was, the source executable, so you shouldn't have seen you app launch during install on a non-development machine.

Good work on pinning down the issue.  The problem is quite easy to avoid, but very hard to explain when you actually run into it! 🙂

Mert A.
National Instruments