Installing WinHelp msu on Vista with NSIS

Archive: Installing WinHelp msu on Vista with NSIS

Clockwatcher
29th May 2007 16:29 UTC

Installing WinHelp msu on Vista with NSIS
My application uses the WinHelp help system. As many of you may be aware, WinHelp is not supported by Vista. I know that the proper solution to this is to update my help documents to a supported help system but unfortunately I don't have the time at this point.

I checked around the Microsoft website and found a WinHelp installer for Vista - an msu file. What I planned on doing was updating my NSIS install script to call this msu file and silently install WinHelp during my application's installation. Here's my code:

ExecWait "wusa.exe $EXEDIR\winhelp.msu /quiet /norestart"

When I try to execute this on a Vista box, I don't get any errors. But when I check to see if the patch installed correctly in Control Panel --> Programs, I see that it didn't install. When I try to launch the help documentation from my application, it doesn't launch.

I can manually install WinHelp on the machine and it works fine, it's just that I was hoping to silently install WinHelp so the user isn't bothered with installing it. Any ideas?

Also, if any of you can suggest a good help format and an application for creating help files in that format I would be thankful.

Afrow UK
29th May 2007 17:56 UTC

Make sure you put quotes around the path:
ExecWait 'wusa.exe "$EXEDIR\winhelp.msu" /quiet /norestart'

Stu

Clockwatcher
29th May 2007 18:27 UTC

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately that didn't work Stu, although I did modify all of my code to include the quotes.

I did find this article which I think is the root of my problem...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929761

This problem occurs because Wusa.exe does not make the appropriate Windows Update Agent (WUA) API call that notifies the WUA that the package contains a custom software license agreement. Also, Wusa.exe does not notify the WUA that Windows Update can install the package without displaying the custom software license agreement.

Thanks for the help.