Problems with Windows updates April 2012 and MSI uninstaller

[Cantor, Scott]

> They then updated to 2.4.3. After the update things still did not work.
> They suspected that the installer did not remove all files/registry
> entries. After another remove and re-install, things seem now to work again.

They were wrong, though. There aren't any real registry entries of significance, and older files really wouldn't matter, they're just unused even if they're lying around. The most an old registry entry would do is affect some of the plans for the newer installers, but that doesn't apply to anything we have now.

> In any case, they suggested that there should be an uninstall/removal
> script that deletes all traces of Shibboleth, even from previous versions.

If you delete all the files, there's really nothing left. You could delete the service control manager entry for shibd, but it doesn't do any real harm, and just gets overwritten by a reinstall.

And then you have Apache. Those traces can't be removed because they aren't put there by the installer. And I can pretty much promise that whatever it was involved the Apache configuration. Somebody screwed up a config change, and then it failed the next time it was restarted as a matter of timing. Apache for Windows doesn't spawn child processes, so once the config loads, it stays loaded until a restart without any sign of a problem.
 
-- Scott