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Problem during Installation?

 
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Question: 

I'm having trouble installing PD Pro 3.2 or the 3.5 update patch. I think I successfully downloaded the file, and unzipped (extracted) it from the zip file if applicable. When I double-click to run the executable installer file, a first phase seems to extract many files into a temp folder. The progress bar goes through to the end, and at that point it doesn't install Dogwaffle. Instead, it starts the dialog window for installation of another product (audio drivers, printer./scanner, mpeg/dvd,... you name it)

What can I do?


Answer:

In some rare cases such problem of botched installation can be fixed by cleaning out the content of the Temp folder. Somehow, our installer's SETUP.EXE file wasn't installed or wasn't found and thus failed to execute.

The installation involves two phases:


There is a quick way to cleanup the files and subfolders found in the Temp folder: 
- you open 'My Computer' and
- right-click on the C: drive,
- then select 'Properties'.
- In the main tab you'll see a Disk Cleanup button. Click it. One of the things this does it clean out the Temp
folder. Click OK and confirm you want to proceed with the cleanup.

If you have never done this and the computer is a few years old, this may just have found you a few gigabytes of disk space ;-)

On Windows XP, each user has his/her own Temp folder, in addition to there beinga system Temp folder. The temp folder that needs perhaps to be cleaned out is the user-specific Temp folder. It can be found in

      C:\Documents and Settings

under the folder of your login username, in a subfolder  named 'Local Settings'

If you already have an old Setup.exe file in that Temp folder, and if such Setup.exe file is locked or otherwise prevented from being replaced by our installer's attempt to put itself there during the first phase of the installation (the self-extraction phase), then that could cause the second phase to fail, because our installer attempts to run the file named SETUP.EXE  which it things was copied into the Temp folder like the other 300 or so files from our installer's self-extraction.  Instead of our Setup file, the old Setup file is run.

Another thing that can happen is that your environment variable called 'Path' is corrupted in a way that it ends up looking for executable files in other folders first, before the current folder. Some software installations have the bad habit of prepoending their folders to the Path, and if a Setup.exe file is left in that prepended folder location then this can prevent future setup.exe executions from running successfully because the prior, older setup.exe file may be found and executed instead.

These are the scenarios we're  aware of which can make unexpected and strange things happen, such as

- (re)installing an Mpeg2/DVD driver
- (re)installing a soundcard driver
- (re)installing a printer or scanner driver

etc etc...    in most or almost all of these cases, an old setup.exe was executed instead of ours - either because ours wasn't allowed to get into the Temp folder, or because despite it being placed there successfully, your PC's Path variable didn't make it possible for our Setup.exe to actually be found and executed - a different setup.exe in a different folder was invoked instead.

To check on your PATH or Path variables, use the Control Panel, open the 'System' panel, view the 'Advanced' tab and find the 'Environment Variables' button.

In many cases and new versions of Windows you can also get to it by entering 'Environment' in the Windows Search from the taskbar.