No Icon fo Installer >576Mb ?

PaRaDoXial
13th November 2003 12:20 UTC

No Icon fo Installer >576Mb ?
hey... i finally logged in to the forums... my other nick "PaRaDoXide", seemed to have trouble with validation.. anywayz....

why is it that the icon for my 'NSIS Created' Installer disappears when it reaches the 576Mb mark...? i noe that it is 576 Mb because i saw the icon and the size of the executable update itself in my windows window as the "MakeNSIS.exe" program began compiling all the files into the executable and when directly after the 576 Mb mark, the icon disappeared and now it looks like a .com file's icon... :eek: help please? what do i do to get it back?

I suppose you need my script? well it is attached...

kichik
13th November 2003 12:31 UTC

The icon is there, Windows just doesn't like to show it for large files. I guess it has some limit so icon loading will be faster or something like that... If you really want the icon you can create a silent wrapper installer that will just call the bug installer and pass along the command line arguments.

PaRaDoXial
13th November 2003 12:36 UTC

k.... thank you... that takes a load of my mind... :) i thought my script had some problems... haha.... now i can go study for my GCE 'O' Levels in peace... :)

thanx,
Shawn

PaRaDoXial
14th November 2003 01:27 UTC

i solbed the problem of rno icon for istaller >576Mb
Just create a shortcut to it from the desktop and soon the icon should be displayed.... haha... i haven't tried it on other systems yet so maybe it's just specific to my computer... :)

BFuture_BM
11th January 2007 09:19 UTC

i think i came across with the same problem. My installer with ~700MB shows only the default icon; if i exclude file statements from the same script to downsize the installer, the icon (MUI_ICON) is shown properly.

My Question is - is this problem still an unsolved windows (xp) specific bug or are there new workarounds available? Because for example the default winXP zip-icon is still there for files bigger than 1Gig.

Thanks in advance!

Red Wine
11th January 2007 10:25 UTC

Already discussed above! Workarounds provided above!
BTW did you try to make sfx from the bigger than 1gb zip?

BFuture_BM
11th January 2007 11:23 UTC

Thank you for your response!

I recognized the workarounds, mentioned above but they either don't work or aren't appropriate for me; providing the installer with only one file (without wrapper or file splitting) is unfortunately a must.

Also the shortcut-creation mentioned by PaRaDoXial doesn't works for me, because, trying to change the icon of the shortcut, windows says the installer doesn't contain any symbols.

So it was my question if there are any new insights since 2003, especially because of the fact that, due to the replies above it seems for me to be rather a windows- than a nsis-specific bug. Searching google about this issue was without success.

What do you mean by 'try to make sfx from the zip'?
It's a 1.5Gig sized, zip-compressed file from a installation dvd and because i have no specific zip program installed at the moment, the explorer shows the icon for the default windows zip programm (the yellow folder with the zipper).
But writing this i tried to rename my installer to *.zip and it also shows the zip icon, so am i right that windows can't handle custom icons but its home icons from (e.g. from shell32.dll) for large files?

Red Wine
11th January 2007 11:59 UTC

EDIT:
Also there is a recent thread,
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....hreadid=261911

Recently, in fact after the above thread has been posted for 1st time, I made an sfx from a 640 Mb rar package, well, the resulting sfx has the same prob with icon while the parent rar displays the default rar icon normally.

demiller9
11th January 2007 14:07 UTC

Originally posted by BFuture_BM
My Question is - is this problem still an unsolved windows (xp) specific bug or are there new workarounds available? Because for example the default winXP zip-icon is still there for files bigger than 1Gig.

I think the icon problem is just with exe files; the icon shows up correctly for other files because the extension alone determines the icon (like zip, rar, etc). The system needs to scan an exe to find the icon, but doesn't want to do that for large files.

Don

BFuture_BM
12th January 2007 10:13 UTC

I think the icon problem is just with exe files

Yes, it seems so.
And I was actually surprised because my current build of the installer shows the custom icon (about 717MB).
It's just the daily build, so no changes were made to the script except for some automated File statement excludes & includes.

I will keep track of the behaviour...

stb
12th January 2007 11:57 UTC

btw: Is the size limit adjustable in WinXP? I personally have some dirs with large files and Explorer is slow because the Icons are loading slow. If I could I would reduce the size to 5MB or something like that.

Is it possible to disable EXE icons by source (network drive)?

Is it possible to speed up icon display anyway (e.g. could NSIS store the icon at a better position in file)?

onad
30th January 2007 15:17 UTC

1) NSIS store the icon at a better position in file)?
It is an OS defect not an NSIS one, only creating a smarter script somehow we can come up with aworkaround for how the OS handles the displaying of an icon.

One Idea comes to mind, feed the OS iconcache directly and inject the icon into it imediately as the installer start, but is not easy to do!

2) Big ZIP's show an icon since they are ZIP's not EXE's and the OS Shell links this to the Icon to be shown, in other words, that is not the same scenario.

stb
1st February 2007 14:05 UTC

Originally posted by onad
[B]1) NSIS store the icon at a better position in file)?
It is an OS defect not an NSIS one,

I know this is quite OS-related. I didn't know that the icon always has to be at the end of the file (or something similar).

only creating a smarter script somehow we can come up with aworkaround for how the OS handles the displaying of an icon.

One Idea comes to mind, feed the OS iconcache directly and inject the icon into it imediately as the installer start, but is not easy to do!

Thanks for this idea, but I personally think this hack could/would result in weird problems (Microsoft might change those things in future Windows)

say_ook
29th August 2007 14:57 UTC

Has MS documented this?
Does anyone have a link to Microsoft's documentation of this behavior?

I need something to show the bosses to close a bug about this behavior in my installer. I've tried searching the MS site, but I must not be using the right magic words.

kichik
29th August 2007 18:56 UTC

Manually create a program with the same size and show that to them.

99999999
6th January 2008 17:44 UTC

This is well defined by Microsoft on the MSDN website, however the exact limit is defined by the OS you are using.

fitzroy_doll
24th June 2009 19:40 UTC

Sorry to bump an old topic, but for anyone else that's wondering about this, there is a quick way to tell where the problem lies: if your custom icon appears in the top left of the installer page, but not in explorer, then the problem is with explorer, not your icon.

Can't find the MSDN article on the subject, but other than creating a silent wrapper installer as above, there is no solution.