I have an installer that I have been using for many years. It consists of about 15 different dlls most of which are added to the GAC by adding them via the Assemblies area of AI.

Previously whenever I have installed and then uninstalled the product all of the dlls have been removed too. I have checked the Global Assembly Cache and they are no longer there.

However with this new dll it is added to the GAC but on install it is not removed.

I am looking at the settings for this dll and it looks exactly the same as all the other files. On the Organization tab the "Permanent" check is not set (none of the other attributes are set either).

Is there a way of seeing the work that is done during an install to see if there was a problem removing the file?

Any ideas?

I am not sure what happened but I removed the component from the AI build and added it back again. Now when I run the installer it behaves as it should.

Annoying that I could not get to the bottom of why it would not uninstall but pleased that it is working now.

Hello,

Basically, this can happen if the same components are shared between multiple packages installed on the same machine. Windows Installer keeps a refcount for the components and does allow removing them until all the applications that use them are removed. For more details, you can check the "Why files are left behind after package uninstall?" FAQ article.

Anyway, we are glad that you have solved this problem and thank you for following this up.

Best regards,
Liviu