How to fix Warning 1910 error in Visual Studio Installer project?

Question

I have an installation project (Visual Studio installation project) that has a link to the desktop and the beginning of a menu to display the project. Both of these shortcuts refer to the same output node.

When I try to uninstall, I get the following error:

Warning 1910. Failed to remove Bing Background.lnk shortcut. Make sure the shortcut file exists and you can access it.

Any idea what causes this and how to fix it?

Answer 1

Indeed, the read-only attribute seems to constantly reproduce this problem (several tests run in Win Vista and 7). For those of interest to you, I have created a small DLL that checks the attribute and removes it if it is present. You can find the topics attached to this post (page 2) . You can use the DLL in packages created using any tool that you have if it creates an installation based on MSI.

I would suggest, I can’t say for sure that the Windows installer modifies this INI file, for example, if the shortcut that is being deleted was configured by the user after installing it.

I conducted several tests, created a package that installs a shortcut on the desktop and launches it, during uninstallation and installation I see that msiexec.exe constantly refers to "desktop.ini". Then I removed the shortcut from the package and cleared the log from Process Monitor , and then the new installation and uninstall process. I could not find any trace of msiexec.exe by accessing desktop.ini anymore.

I did not have too much time to search for documents about the reasons why the Windows Installer accesses this file, but while I was searching, I could not find anything. Most likely, our friends from Microsoft did not officially publish anything about this, believing that the attributes of this file should be intact.

Answer 2

See this topic: Windows 8 shortcut removal warning

The research is still ongoing, but I would like to share some information. It appears that playback machines that have desktop.ini with a read-only attribute installed on it, a delete message appears to appear. If the read-only attribute is deleted, the message will not appear. For the installed package for each desktop.ini machine, the interest will be here :: \ Users \ Public \ Public Desktop. Feel free to share your feedback on this and I will send the message again, as I have information to share.

Answer 3

Please note that there may be two files in the “Desktop” folder with the name “desktop.ini”, so make sure that you check the properties of each of them.

And they are not sorted by name so that they appear side by side, so it’s easy to skip that there are two files.

This explains why there are two desktop.ini files: http://www.howtogeek.com/198704/why-are-there-two-desktop.ini-files-on-windows-desktops/

Answer 4

This is due to read-only settings in the desktop.ini file. See here for more details.