How to Write a Craptastic Windows Installer
Posted on February 28th, 2006
I was tidying things up around the old desktop, and I came across a folder on my C: drive called Files which was both silly-- it might as well be called "1s and 0s" or "stuff"-- and suspicious. This folder contained 29 files. Some were GIFs, some were text files, some were .reg files. Looking at the GIFs and text files, they were clearly ads of some sort. The only indication of who these files belonged to came from opening the .reg files in Notepad. There I find references to HP Share-to-Web, something that I recall having been bundled with my scanner software and which I also recall not wanting to have anything to do with. But it was one of those applications that you can't really uninstall, due to its innate crappiness, so the best you can do is pretend it's not there.
On those grounds I felt well within my rights to trash the Files folder and get on with my life. So I did. But then the next day I start up my computer again and this installer windows pops up. It's HP Share-to-Web again, but I don't immediately make the connection to the Files folder. Whatever this installer is trying to do, it's having a hard time of it. After churning away for a couple minutes it asks me to locate some unfindable file. Since I have no idea why this installer is even running in the first place, I know even less about where to find the mystery file. So I hit the Cancel button, only to watch the installer start over, churn a while longer, and again ask me to find the file. It's caught in an infinite loop-- I can't complete the installation because I don't have the file. I can't have the file because I didn't complete the installation. It takes a trip to the Task Manager before I can make the installer go away.
Meanwhile, my scanner is working fine. Because whatever software I need, I already have and have had for a long time.
Later on I pull the Files folder out of the Recycle Bin and find that at my next startup, all is well. Then I connect the dots back to the Files folder. Apparently every time I log in HP Share to Web is looking around to make sure all its files are in place, including the 29 members of the Files folder, and utterly flipping out if it finds any missing. That's retarded. Especially when the program in question has nothing to do with whether or not my scanner works.
By virtue of the company my scanner software chooses to keep, though, I have no choice but to consider the whole HP menagerie the worst thing ever.