Vassal not uninstalling other versions properly

Technical Support & Bugs
1

Windows 7 64-bit.

I noticed this a bit ago (during the 3.5 betas), but hadn’t gotten around to investigating.

So, during that run-up, I was doing custom installs, telling it to keep 3.4.13 (or whichever was the current version of 3.4 at that point), and remove the previous 3.5 beta. I noticed that the previous beta didn’t seem to get removed.

I went back to a standard install for 3.5.0, and that seemed okay. However, 3.5.1 acted a little funny on a standard install. It installed and ran correctly. However, the pinned version of Vassal on my start menu continued showing as valid, instead of a broken shortcut (which is the usual). Indeed, starting from that, it was still 3.5.0.

According to the Vassal folder in the Start Menu, there’s three versions currently present:
VASSAL 3.5.0-beta2
VASSAL 3.5.0-beta3
VASSAL [which is 3.5.1]

And then looking in the main Windows program files directory, I still have all these versions present:
VASSAL 3.4.3
VASSAL 3.4.8
VASSAL 3.4.9
VASSAL 3.4.13 [I know I installed most every version of 3.4 along the way; I might have missed 3.4.12, but not that *and* .10 and .11]
VASSAL 3.5.0
VASSAL 3.5.0-beta2
VASSAL 3.5.0-beta3
VASSAL 3.5.1

Going through the ‘uninstall a program’ dialog, the only one Windows knows about (presumably the only one with a registry entry) is 3.5.1.

2

Do any of those directories contain files?

3

Yes. But it’s a mix.

3.4.9 only has the jre and lib subdirectories (with files).

3.4.3, 3.4.8, and 3.4.13 only has the main VASSAL.exe file (which 3.4.9 doesn’t).

All the 3.5.x versions look to be complete installs (including the ‘doc’ subdirectories that isn’t with 3.4.9).

4

I’m going to need the complete list of files in each of those directories in order to troubleshoot this.

5

Okay, this should be a complete listing of everything across the various versions.

6

And after two more rounds (installing 3.5.2 and 3.5.3), the behavior continues. The Start Menu just has the two beta versions listed above and the current 3.5.3, but I’ve still got what looks like full installed directories of 3.5.2 and 3.5.3 added to the list.

7

Thus spake Rindis:

And after two more rounds (installing 3.5.2 and 3.5.3), the behavior
continues. The Start Menu just has the two beta versions listed above
and the current 3.5.3, but I’ve still got what looks like full installed
directories of 3.5.2 and 3.5.3 added to the list.

We’ve fixed the problem in the current test build, which is
3.5.4-SNAPSHOT-6e198cebf. The cause was that on Windows 7 and later, the
old uninstallers kicked off by the new installer would fail to establish
a mutex to prevent being run twice and would exit rather than continue
to do the uninstall.

For any version which doesn’t show up in Windows’ Uninstall Programs
list, you can safely remove the installed files.

–
J.