It's because the olders you're installing files to can be in per-user or per-machine locations depending on the value of the ALLUSERS property. For example, your start menu, or the AllUser's start menu. Since the package doesn't know what ALLUSERS will be set to until it's executed, the validation has to be prepared for either case. And so, if ALLUSERS were to be set to 0 (baring in mind a user could do this via commandline against your will) the files in these folders would only exist for the user that installed the application. So, in this example, a new user logging on to the system wouldn't have those files and they may be vital to the running of the program and will probbaly see a lot of crashes or missing content - a poor experience.
By giving components installed into these potentially per-user locations keypaths in a per-user location (such as a registry value in HKCU) then any new user that's missing these components will get an automated repair on runup (because they won't have the HKCU keypaths either) and will have those files installed as needed and the app gets everything it wants. The bad side to this is that if you have a per-machine installtion, which you almost always will, all new users will get a repair even though they actually have all the files... the repair only puts in these registry values added to satisfy the ICE. This, in my eyes, is an equally undesireable user experience. There is a special type of registry value you can use as a keypath; just set Root="HKMU". These special entries will resolve the root to either HKCU or HKLM depending on the value of ALLUSERS (just like those special folders) and so everything matches and users only get a repair in the per-user type installation. However, ICE validation isn't sophisticated enough to spot this functionality being in place, and even though it's the perfect answer to all cases does not satisfy the ICE and will fail Vista Logo certification! Best of luck, Gareth -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/ICE38-error-tf3551115.html#a9937392 Sent from the wix-users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
