Question

I have a Visual Studio project consisting of a service and an installer for it. During the development I have installed and uninstalled the msi-package at least fifty times but last time I tried to uninstall it I got an error message saying "the installed product does not match the installation source" and if I click "Ok" on that message i get the following: "The path xxxxxx.msi cannot be found." So, first it doesn t match and then cannot be found. Or something. The msi-package do exist on the path given in error message (I have replaced the real path and package name by xxxxx).

What I mean by installing the service is double clicking the msi-package that the "Build Solution" function creates and by uninstalling I mean Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs.

I use Windows XP and Visual Studio 2003 in this particular project.

I have installed and uninstalled this and other visual studio developed services hundreds or thousands of times but have never had this problem before.

What should I do?

Answer 1

I ve seen this happen before. Essentially the installer (.msi) windows wants to use is not available where it believes it should be stored. Why this happens I m not entirely sure but to fix it you have a couple of options.

Put your MSI in the place where windows is looking for it
Forcefully remove your product entry from the MSI catalog using MsiZap. This option is a bit riskier since it s deleting all references to your service vs actually uninstalling it. However the risk is low if it s a service you ve developed and it s just your dev machine.

Answer 2

Another utility I ve used to get rid of a Windows service is sc.exe. You can do something like: sc.exe delete "Service name". Restarting the machine also helps sometimes.

Answer 3

I had a problem just like this one, where a service in Visual Studio somehow became corrupted and could be neither fully uninstalled nor installed. I managed to fully uninstall it using an online tool at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17588/fix-problems-that-block-programs-from-being-installed-or-removed.

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