When deployment images have a short memory

**** Update ******
The Microsoft hotfix to cure the problem as described in this article is now available here  

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2663352

You will need to provide an email address to download the fix.
Thanks.
*********************

Recently it was brought to my attention that you could end up in a situation where a reinstall of Inventor might take forever to finish without any visible signs of activity or progress.

If you would leave the reinstall run over night (or for several hours), the process finishes successfully.
The problem is that not many users will have the patience to let the process sit and run for so long and they will probably kill the reinstall process.

The reason why I wrote this blog post is to just ask you to be patient and let the process take its time because otherwise you might end up with a corrupt Inventor installation.

The scenario that can bring you in this situation is:

1. Create a deployment image with Inventor 2012 and place the image in a network location
2. Append Service pack 1 to the deployment image via the setup wizard (choose the Install service Pack(s) from local network option, see image)
   
   
   
   
3. Hit the Add button and enter the network location (that requires login credentials) of the service pack you want to add.
4. Enter the user name and password but don't check the option "Remember my credentials" in the Windows Security dialog
5. Install the deployment and run Inventor once to fully register it
6. From the Control Panel, try either a reinstall or a repair of Inventor

The result is that the installation process will seemingly hang because of a Microsoft defect that causes the installer to do a check on the credentials for every file that is part of the deployment image.
Every check takes a couple of seconds, multiplied with a large amount of files, gives you this long delay that might take hours.  

Note that when you try to click the Cancel button or the Exit "X" button, there is also no response which tempts users to kill the process from Task Manager.

While we are actively pursuing a solution with Microsoft for this problem, momentarily the only two remedies are:

1. Always check the "Remember my credentials" option when you create deployment images
2. If you prefer to continue to work with a deployment image that has the "Remember my credentials" option unchecked, disconnect the machine from the network before you try to reinstall Inventor.
   A dialog asking for the source file location will pop up and allows you to input the correct location and the reinstall will proceed successfully without excessive delays.

 

We will update this blog post once Microsoft makes a fix available.

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Cory McConnell]

I have a related issue - I am unable to append a SP to my deployments - have you seen this before?

[Bob Van der Donck]

Do you get an error message or is the SP nowhere to be seen in the Windows control panel or in the About dialog? Did you check you log files in %temp% for any clue?
Seen a similar report on the newgsroup a while ago without any real solution http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Installation-Licensing/2012-Deployment-does-not-include-SP/td-p/3158974

Bob