I am having problems with a ClickOnce app failing with a manifest error. I have tried variations and done several installs/reinstalls on myWindows 7 laptopafter republishing the app to correct the error. The last ClickOnce installthrew an error at the end of the install saying it couldn't run the app, and does not appear to have finalized the install. IOW, it is now in a limbo state. It is "installed" if I rerun ClickOnce and the app comes up as it thinks it is current, but it is not in add/remove programs nor the Start/All Programs... so there is no way to open it without running the installation page.

Question: How do I uninstall a partially installed app? Unfortunately, it appears that ClickOnce makes heavy use of the registry with many dependencies... and cleaning this up when the install fails prematuraly may be difficult to nearly impossible. If so, this is a a potentially HUGE support issue if users run into an install failure prior to completion.

And if this doesn't work, try deleting the Apps\2.0 folder under the user profile. On Vista and Win7, this is located at:

C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Apps\2.0\

RobinDotNet

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Click here to visit my ClickOnce blog!

Hello Bill,

Thanks for your posting on MSDN forum.

I performed a test on my side on Windows 7 RTM, however, To troubleshoot this issue, could you please show us the detailed steps to reproduce the problem? So that we can investigate the issue locally. It is not necessary that you send out the whole of your project. We just need a simplest sample to reproduce the problem. You can remove any confidential information or business details from it. I appreciate your work on providing these information.

>How do I uninstall a partially installed app?

You can try with the mage.exe to clear the downloaded application cache of all online-only applications.

Mage -cc

More information
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/acz3y3te.aspx

Thanks,
Rong-Chun Zhang
MSDN Subscriber Support in Forum
If you have any feedback on our support, please contact msdnmg@microsoft.com

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And if this doesn't work, try deleting the Apps\2.0 folder under the user profile. On Vista and Win7, this is located at:

C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Apps\2.0\

RobinDotNet

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Click here to visit my ClickOnce blog!

Thanks, Rong-Chung.

Unfortunately, I am not sure what caused the problem in the first place. I was having problems with what turned out to be an orphaned cert being used to sign one of the approximately 20 modules the app has been broken into in order to reduce ClickOnce update time (the app is large). We weren't sure if this was the problem and I was uninstalling and pushing to our co-lo. This was time-consuming and I next tried uninstalling and installing from my local IIS after installing a self-signed cert. The ClickOnce update produced a message failed when trying to start the download and said to contact the provider (us). I republished a zipped version to push to the co-lo as before. There was nothing to uninstall after the Windows 7 failure, so I assumed nothing happened. However, the attempt to install from the resulted in the issue described in the op and I wound up stuck in a way where I could neither go forward nor roll back.

I had already tried clearing using mage, but that didn't help (the app is marked for both offline and online use). I am next going to try the suggestion to delete the 2.0 folder and hope that works.

-- Bill

Thank, you. Thank, you. Thank, you Robin. You are a life-saver. Deleting the folder allowed me to reinstall and the app is performing as expected now (we even found the problem module that started all of this in the first place.)

My biggest concern was a Google search turned up nothing but bad news on how to manually uninstall a ClickOnce app and we had concern on what the ramifications might be once we go to production should this problem occur with one of our global users. Deleting the folder may be a brute-force method, but at least it is simple.

You're welcome.

I'm surprised "mage -cc" didn't work, but sometimes there's just stuff left behind and you have to manuall delete it. Of course, both of these methods completely remove all clickonce applications, and the user will have to reinstall any others he may have.

One other thing -- you said something about changing certificates. Please be aware that if you change the certificate, your users may have to uninstall and reinstall the application in these cases:

1) You are performing programmatic updates.
2) Your have users running Windows Vista and you are not targeting the .Net 3.5 Framework.
3) You have users running Windows XP who have not installed SP-1 for .Net 2.0 and you are not targeting the .Net 3.5 Framework.

There's more info about this, and about how to create long-lasting certificates, in this blog entry, if you're interested:

http://robindotnet.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/clickonce-and-expiring-certificates/

Good luck!

RobinDotNet

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Click here to visit my ClickOnce blog!