Uninstalling distribution built in Labwindows removes device drivers

[umquat]

Have a problem I just cant get my head round. Have been developing in LabWindows for a relatively short time but one of my colleagues has been working in this environment for a number of years and with earlier (pre 8.0) releases of LabWindows, and he cant figure out whats going on either.

The problem is this. The software distribution that we supply prompts the user at one point if they would like to install drivers that are supplied as part of the distribution. However the install process is not used as a means for doing this. All the install process does is instruct the user how to do this in the Windows environment.

When upgrading to a revised version of the distribution, during the uninstall of the previous versions components the drivers in the WINNT/System32/drivers directory also get removed. Primarily the device in question is a USB specialised COMMS module but there are older ISA based COMMS modules where this also happens.

We cant figure out why the uninstall process should remove the drivers as they essentially werent part of the install process.

Any help / pointers greatly appreciated.

Gavin 

[jr_2005]

Surely this is straight-forward? The installation wants the drivers, so they get installed as a consequence. Upon uninstallation, if no other code on the PC wants to use these dependant drivers, they get uninstalled too. Its all perfectly normal. It might be slightly inconvenient, since an application upgrade will remove them and then put them back again, but that's the way the Windows world works. It might be different, if the drivers were loaded onto the system before the distribution kit was run. Then the kit could not assume that is was solely responsible for the use of the drivers and should not remove them on uninstallation.

JR

[umquat]

If that was the case, then yes... However you can also install the drivers independently, then install the application and select not to install drivers and they still get removed during an upgrade.

Its not such a problem with the USB device because theres no addition configuration, but with the ISA device in this case, it could have one of 10 different base address settings which needs to be configured manually, which is a tad inconvenient. particularly when there may be several releases a month.

The only reason I query this is that in earlier versions of the software which were built under a v6.x evironment this didnt happen.

[umquat]

Just checked something else to confirm this last statement.

Removed all instances of the software package from the PC. Installed USB drivers for external COMMS device. Installed the package, having created it without the driver install request routines, and finally uninstalled it. Installation had no affect on the drivers but the uninstall removed them.

At a loss as to why these drivers are being removed.... I can't help thinking I'm missing something really obvious but ATM I cant put my finger on it.

Regards

Gavin

[GrahamG]

I'm not an expert on windows but when you uninstall does it recognise that the program you are uninstalling is the only one that uses that driver set and therefore tries to be "helpful" in removing them as well?

What happens if you have two versions of your software package on the same machine and then uninstall just the one of them. Assuming these two versions share the same set of drivers will it still remove them?

best regards