[wix-users] 1601 errors followed by 1618

[Jacques Eloff]

Hi

I'm looking into an odd failure and curious if anyone has come across it
before.

1. Nested bundles are executing.
2. First bundle runs fine, then triggers uninstall (upgrade related bundle).
3. Second bundle executes a number of MSIs and the 3rd MSI fails with 1601,
but then succeeds on retry.
4. Next bundle executes, but then all the MSIs return 1618.

Based on the event logs, there were no other installs running - I also
checked CBS/Windows Update logs. My working theory is that whatever caused
the installer services to wobble, failed to release the MSI global mutex,
causing subsequent installs to think there are other installs in progress
when there weren't.

Has anyone seen this behavior before? The worrying part is that it repro's
consistently on some machines, but they're all using the same OS image.
There's nothing odd about the MSIs, we're talking file copying and registry
keys, nothing complicated. I've also compared some of the policy settings
in the registry around the installer service and everything matches.

Shortly after the service failure, the bundle reported having issues
sending some requests over the named pipe to the elevated engine, but the
pipe is never reported as being closed or broken. I'm not sure the two
issues are related. The bundle appears to shut down normally.

I know Burn implemented returning 1618, but that code was turned off
because of nested bundles and hasn't been turned on in 3.x AFAIK.

>From what I could tell, the retry mechanism overwrote the log of the first
attempt when 1601 was encountered.

Thanks,
Jacques