Periodic automatic re-installation of VIP 7.5

Harrison Pratt · Post by **Harrison Pratt** » 20 Jan 2015 20:40

From time to time, about weekly, when I try to open VIP 7.5 CE it starts a new/repair/update (?) installation process. It is annoying because it significantly delays opening the IDE and if I get too anxious and try to open the IDE by clicking on the desktop icon before the installation is completed then I get a dialog advising me to wait for the FIRST installation to be completed before starting another installation!

Do I have some setting wrong in my installation? I don't think that PDC is updating VIP that often.

Post by **Thomas Linder Puls** » 21 Jan 2015 9:01

Visual Prolog is not update automatically.

What you experience must be a Windows problem. I don't know what makes it happen, but I have experienced it for some other programs.

Wild guess: uninstallation + boot + reinstallation could help.

Harrison Pratt · Post by **Harrison Pratt** » 21 Jan 2015 14:39

Hmmm ... the Start Menu shortcut points to the VIP directory. If I make a short cut directly to VIP.EXE the IDE launches much faster. I haven't yet traced out what happens when launching from the Start Menu shortcut (or a copy of that shortcut placed on the desktop). It seems like it might be an installation configuration issue. (Win XP SP3). Perhaps it's trying to re-install the Examples. I'll try to puzzle it out.

Meanwhile, the direct link seems (so far) to solve the problem.

Harrison Pratt · Post by **Harrison Pratt** » 25 Jan 2015 17:30

Thanks for the info on auto-updating.

From Control Panel | Add or Remove Programs I did a Repair of the VIP 7.501 installation and the problem seems to be fixed.

Harrison

Thomas Linder Puls wrote:Visual Prolog is not update automatically.

What you experience must be a Windows problem. I don't know what makes it happen, but I have experienced it for some other programs.

Wild guess: uninstallation + boot + reinstallation could help.

Harrison Pratt · Post by **Harrison Pratt** » 7 May 2016 14:35

This is still happening about weekly with a fresh install on a new Win10 PC with SSD.
I wonder if McAfee virus scan has something to do with it.

Post by **Thomas Linder Puls** » 9 May 2016 21:43

The "net" seems to think this has to do with "auto-repair" and something called advertised short-cuts.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2060 ... -everytime
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2932 ... pplication
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3825 ... in-each-ti

I was not aware that such short-cuts existed or that our installer are creating such short cuts. But it seems you can solve the problem by deleting the short cut and create another one manually (or locate the exe and "pin" it to the start menu or task bar).

Harrison Pratt · Post by **Harrison Pratt** » 10 May 2016 14:41

I was not aware that such short-cuts existed or that our installer are creating such short cuts.

It was all new to me too, and since only VP was causing problems on WinXP or Win10 I wrongly thought it was unique to VP. A clue is that in both system the Target: field in the link Properties is a textual product description, not a fully-qualified file name (<DRIVE>:\<PATH>\<NAME.EXE>).

But it seems you can solve the problem by deleting the short cut and create another one manually (or locate the exe and "pin" it to the start menu or task bar).

I tried both of these approaches on WinXP and both worked. Now I can apply the same work around on Win10 with a clear conscience!

Thanks for your help,
Harrison

P.S. Description of the rationale for advertised shortcuts: http://www.symantec.com/connect/article ... -shortcuts

Re:

Re: