Re: [Gretl-devel] Vista oddity
On Thu, 3 Sep 2009, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti wrote:
Yesterday one of our PhD students came to me with the weirdest thing:
she
previously had two separate gretl installs on different subdirectories
(don't ask me why) on her Windows Vista PC.
After removing them both, she proceeded to install 1.8.4. The install went
fine, except for one thing: double-clicking an existing gdt or inp file
launched gretl alright, but running gretlw32 "dry" produced an instance of
gretl with no menu bar (!!!)...
No menu bar means that gretl couldn't find its UI definition file,
gretlmain.xml. This is installed into the "ui" subdir of the
top-level gretl directory.
; I'm no Vista expert, but I managed to go back to normal by:
1) uninstalling gretl
2) deleting everything gretl-related from the registry via regedit (long
and boring)
3) re-installing gretl
I have no idea why this worked, but it did. If someone more windows-savvy
than I am (doesn't take much) could see to it...
When you uninstall gretl in the prescribed way (i.e. running the
supplied uninstaller) this normally wipes out all gretl's registry
entries. However if you have two separate gretl installs on the
same machine, I can imagine that Inno Setup (and the registry)
might get a trifle confused and the usual clean-up might go wrong.
(The Inno uninstaller is very scrupulous about not touching
anything that was not put in place by the corresponding
installer.)
IMO you did exactly the right thing. Yes, cleaning out the
registry manually is a bore, but that will be required only if the
user has done something, er, rather silly.
Not unrelated: I've just done a major clean-up of gretl's start-up
configuration mechanism, removing outdated cruft, trying to avoid
unnecessary duplication of effort and to ensure more consistency
across platforms (and also to address bug 2843717). But I don't
think that would have made any difference in the case you
describe.
Allin