Microsoft, Why Are You Blocking Processes?
I was playing around with some things last night, including the new SETI@Home client software. I tried to install it a bunch of times, with no luck. I’d click on the installer exe file, but it would just sit there, no splash screen or “unpacking archive” message or anything. I know it worked because I used it on a different computer with no luck.
Turns out when I rebooted this morning (for other reasons) that I had an ABC program that never exited properly, or froze, or died, or whatever. When I killed that upon the prompt of windows warning me it couldn’t kill it itself on shutdown all of a suddent the SETI@Home software suddenly popped up and started installing.
What I want to know, really is what the fuck? Why is one random process stopping another from even running? Not only that, why is there NO INDICATION of the reason given to the user. I downloaded the software several times because I thought it might have gotten currupted. If there were libraries in use, or locked, or broken why the hell didn’t I get a nice ugly error message on the screen? I got nothing, just a “setup.exe” process running in the task list but doing nothing. What would you even search for to find answers.
This is just one of the reasons I hate microsoft. Go on Scoble, link me as another Microsoft hater, ha ha people who say they hate microsoft are funny, ha ha.
sigh
Oh right, MS loves their users, I forgot.
I’ve run into this before, and I don’t know the whole story, but it appears that sometimes the MSIEXEC (or whatever the spelling is) process that takes care of installing programs gets hung up… you can’t “end process” on the buggers, but you CAN “Kill -f pid” (if you don’t have that, I’ll email you) and everything goes back to normal (usually). You could also R-Click My Computer, Manage, Services and Stop/Start the “Windows Installer” Service (haven’t tried this, but in theory it does much the same ???)
Also, how the HELL do you get angle brackets past your html stripper thingy? (ie re-direct or “option indication thingies”)
HTH
The point is not that you can get around it, my bitch is that I had no idea what the hell was going on until hours later when I rebooted and noticed that windows was trying unsucessfully to shut down a different process, which when shut down let the setup.exe (finally) run. If a messagebox with “library foo.dll locked” or something like that had popped up I’d at least have had the slightest indication as to the problem, instead of the app simply starting but not going anywhere.
As for <angle brackets> you’d have to use “& lt ;” and “& gt ;” (without spaces or quotes of course).