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PRB: Add/Remove Programs applet inaccessible after uninstall finishes

Article Created: 2004-03-03 19:34 GMT by Jordan Russell
Last Updated: 2004-04-15 17:26 GMT by Jordan Russell

If you spawn a process using the [UninstallRun] section, the Add/Remove Programs window in Windows 2000 and later may remain in an inaccessible state after the uninstaller returns.

This happens because the Add/Remove Programs applet waits not only for the uninstaller process to finish but also all processes it spawned. (Specifically, it does this by placing the uninstaller process inside a job object, and waiting on that job object.) Therefore, if you spawn a process that does not terminate, the Add/Remove Programs applet will wait indefinitely.

I'm not aware of any "clean" workaround for this. If possible, you simply should avoid spawning processes in the [UninstallRun] section that never terminate. But, if the process is something that starts automatically on boot one thing you could try is setting UninstallRestartComputer=yes to force a reboot, instead of (re)starting the process from the uninstaller.