[wix-users] Uninstallation issues

[Joseph L. Casale]

> From: Edwin Castro [mailto:egcastr at gmail.com] 
> Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2018 9:37 AM
> To: WiX Toolset Users Mailing List <wix-users at lists.wixtoolset.org>
> Cc: Joseph L. Casale <jcasale at activenetwerx.com>
> Subject: Re: [wix-users] Uninstallation issues
>
> You have at least Products with a component with the same Guid="{B54BA604-7CA9-50F0-87CA-0690231F2C09}".
>
> If you can't identify them easily from source then you should be able to see the component guids in verbose logs for all the appropriate Products. OR you could look at the MSIs with Orca or InstEdit and simply look for that guid.

Hi Edwin,
That helped an incredible amount. I do have access to the source however many
of the GUIDs are auto generated. I wrote up a quick console app to query all the
Component and ComponentId columns from the Component table of each MSI.
There are several components that share GUIDs as a result of using auto generated
values.

A quick test in the code generating tooling to use random GUIDs for the website and
application pool allowed them to be all uninstalled.

My understanding is that for upgrades to work, the component GUID must be stable
and unchanged between versions. Do I understand this correctly, if so I will modify
everything to generate deterministic GUIDs based on the product name plus the
component ID.

Thanks a lot for the guidance,
jlc