[tex-live] Windows XP X64 uninstall goes badly, more info.

[T T]

On 12 August 2010 01:17, Beuthe, Thomas <beuthet at aecl.ca> wrote:
> UNRESTRICTED | ILLIMITÉ
>
> I have now tried the install/uninstall of TeXLive 2009 on
> four different systems, several times in some cases.
>
> 1 - Windows XP Laptop corporate image
> 2 - Windows XP Dell Laptop
> 3 - Windows XP X64
> 4 - Windows 7 (64 bit version)
>
> On systems 1 and 4, the install and uninstall worked perfectly.
> On systems 2 and 3, the install did not set the path properly,

How did you test path setting?  For single user installs (non-admin)
the user PATH should be used, otherwise the system PATH.

> and the uninstall did not remove the executable files, as explained previously.
>
> At first I thought the non-removal of files might stem from the
> fact that the system was running a Windows XP X64 operating system,
> but when the procedure went perfectly on the 64-bit Windows 7 system,
> that blew that hypothesis out the window.  On the other hand the
> 32 bit XP (1) system had worked perfectly, so I thought perhaps
> that all XP systems would work well.  The test on system 2 proceeded to
> destroy that idea.
>
> The only other clue I have is a small thing that happens during install.
> On the systems where the install/uninstall proceeded perfectly, the
> third install screen entitled "The screen allows you to configure some options"
> offered three options:
>
> 1) Use letter size instead of A4 by default
> 2) Add shortcuts to the menu and desktop
> 3) Installation for all users.
>
> On the systems were things messed up, the third option was missing.

Thanks for spending so much time on investigating this.  The third
option is conditional on having admin rights, so it seems you don't
have them on these systems.

>From what you describe I'm more and more convinced that this is some
sort of write permissions / security policy settings on those systems
that interfere.  The uninstallation of TL executables is done the same
way as any other files, specifically, by executing:

  rmdir /s /q "C:\texlive\2009\bin"

command from a batch file.  You can try to execute that manually from
the command line after failed uninstall and see if and what kind of
error it generates.  Just be sure NOT to start the cmd.exe through
"Run as", because that may affect the permissions you have.

Or better yet, do the uninstallation from the command line by
executing uninst.bat directly:

  call C:\texlive\2009\tlpkg\installer\uninst.bat >"%temp%\tl-uninst.log" 2>&1

and send me the resulting tl-uninst.log file in the %TEMP% dir.

Cheers,

Tomek