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

[Beuthe, Thomas]

UNRESTRICTED | ILLIMITÉ

The saga continues

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

Several ways.
1) Get into the command line, and type "path": no path to TeXLive
2) Get into the command line and type "latex": wont execute (can't find it)
3) Right click on my computer and navigate to the system settings and look at the actual path.
   Result:  No user path set. Global path does not contain TeXLive

>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.

Not at all.  It takes some time, but when I see something broken, I'd like to
try and help fix it (it's the engineer in me perhaps)

I understand your sentiments regarding administrator rights, but I do try and
make sure that I have administrator rights to all of the windows machines I log into
because I install/uninstall a lot of stuff. I have installed/uninstalled literally
dozens of packages on this machine without a problem.
Besides, why it is that only the executable things don't get deleted.
Only .bat, .cmd, .dll, and .exe files remain!
And why can I readily delete them afterwards by hand from file explorer?

>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.

I didn't try that just yet, favouring the method outlined below:

>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.

Alright, here's what I tried:

I started the command line windows from a shortcut that is targeted directly to:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe
I hope that does not have any consequences with regard to the permissions
you described above.

Then I executed 
C:\texlive\2009\tlpkg\installer\uninst.bat >"%temp%\tl-uninst.log" 2>&1
(without the "call", since we're not in a batch file right now)

This uninstalled everything perfectly, and removed ALL of the files.
As expected from this performance, the contents of the tl-uninst.log file is:
============================================
        1 file(s) copied.
The system cannot find the file specified.
The system cannot find the file specified.
The system cannot find the file specified.
Done uninstalling TeXLive.
The batch file cannot be found.
============================================

The only think I could note is that the path is still as follows:

%SystemRoot%/system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%/System32/Wbem;C:\texlive\2009\bin\win32

I had added the texlive path manually at the end of the global string, 
so perhaps it's not surprising that is still there after the uninstall.

So I deleted the texlive path, and then re-installed.

Since this didn't show anything, I tried a thinking about a different tact.
The uninstall in the registry entry is at the following location correct?:

My Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\TexLive2009

This is currently set to: "C:\texlive\2009\tlpkg\installer\uninst.bat"

How about changing it to: "C:\texlive\2009\tlpkg\installer\uninst.bat >"%temp%\tl-uninst.log" 2>&1"
instead.  But wait, I don't have enough experience with this. Perhaps the double set of quotes
might mess things up?

So I tried putting this string into the registry instead:
 
"C:\texlive\2009\tlpkg\installer\uninst.bat >C:\tl-uninst.log 2>&1"

But that didn't want to work...
The system now thinks TeXLive is already uninstalled, which is clearly incorrect.
when I set it back to "C:\texlive\2009\tlpkg\installer\uninst.bat" again,
everything reacts properly again.

Anyway, that's as far as I got.

Perhaps you can think of something else?

Thomas

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