cervezas
15th November 2006 21:05 UTC

Disappearing installer
A user reports that running our NSIS installer off a CD we shipped her doesn't work. Working with her on the phone I verified that this was the case--neither autorun nor directly launching the setup.exe from the CD launched anything at all. I then had her copy the file to her desktop and try running it from there. After a few moments she said that not only did the installer not launch, but the icon on her desktop disappeared.

My working hypothesis is that anti-virus or anti-spyware software is mistaking the installer for malware and is quarantining or deleting it. But before I call her back with this theory in mind I wanted to know a couple of things:

1) Has anyone seen anything like this before?

2) If the problem is some kind of anti-malware software, is there any general solution to avoiding this kind of problem (short of telling users to turn such software off to perform the installation)?

cervezas
16th November 2006 05:15 UTC

The culprit turned out to be some software called Stopzilla. Disabling Stopzilla from its own menus wasn't sufficient to keep it from vaporizing our installer with its thermonuclear breath. I had to have the user set it so it would not start automatically during system startup, then reboot. Alternatively, they could launch Windows in Safe Mode to perform the installation. Ugly. :(

I'll test against some simple NSIS installers to see if these trigger the problem with Stopzilla and post the results here. Hopefully, a report to the Stopzilla people will produce a product or data update that fixes the problem.

colm
16th November 2006 11:41 UTC

>Has anyone seen anything like this before?

Yeah, during a presentation it got misrecognised as having a virus. These false positives happen quite a bit.

>If the problem is some kind of anti-malware software, is
>there any general solution to avoiding this kind of problem
>(short of telling users to turn such software off to
>perform the installation)?

Not really. The fault isn't with NSIS.

kichik
16th November 2006 20:34 UTC

You should report this to StopZilla. As always, if they're giving you trouble, either give them my e-mail address (kichik@users.sf.net) or give me all the details needed to report this myself. Details include versions of everything involved - NSIS, anti-virus and definition files.