Registry Entries are being deleted.

[teknodude]

Hi All,

I'm not sure this is the right forum to be asking this question, but here it goes. I've got a web application installer that is exhibiting some strange behaviour. After I have run a major upgrade on an existing installation, everything seems to be working fine in my application. Part of the install writes a bunch of data to the registry, so future upgrades can grab the same information. After running my newly upgraded application for a few minutes (after a system reboot), the registry entries are deleted. Well, the values themselves are deleted, the keys remain. I've run regmon from www.sysinternals.com and it shows MSIEXEC.EXE deleting the values. This is so frustrating. Does anyone have an explanation as to why this could be happening?

thx.
tek.

[lsmeteor]

We had a lot of problems with major upgrades and registry. All registry keys created during the initial installation get wiped out at the very end of a major upgrade. This is well documented in this forum.
This is also why we simply walked away from major upgrades.
Our fix was to recreated the registry keys from within our application. Not always easy when you have to take into account all sorts of permission shananigans.

This behaviour should happen at the very end when you click 'Finish', at least that is what we noticed.
I do not know why this would happen only after a few minutes.

Can you try using a minor upgrade instead?