Brackets installer hangs at 0% on Windows for several minutes

[njx]

This was reported by @strugee in an interesting way, via a change to the Troubleshooting doc :)

[njx]

@strugee, is it possible that you have a virus scanner or something else similar running that might be slowing down the installer? I've seen a delay before the Windows access control dialog comes up, but haven't seen anything like a 10-minute delay in the installer itself.

[le717]

I've had the installer take a few minutes for it to come up even after the UAC prompt (Win 8.1 Update 1 x64), but never 10 minutes. The only time I have ever heard of that long of a delay was when somebody was trying to run an old 16-bit InstallShield, and two days plus booting to Linux and back to Windows later, 12 instances of the installer loaded on startup, and obviously that is not the (freak) case here.

[bchintx]

Great observation @le717. There's almost always a somewhat lengthy delay when installing any application, including Brackets, before Windows displays the UAC prompt and allows the installer to continue.

For example, on my Windows 7 machine, it takes about 30-45 seconds before the UAC prompt appears, during which I just see the following:

@strugee If you don't mind, to hopefully help clarify the delay, I'm going to update the Troubleshooting page to reflect the Windows UAC prompt. Having said that, if this description does not accurately reflect the behavior that you're seeing, please feel free to comment on this issue so that we can investigate. Thanks!

[njx]

Marking no priority on the assumption that what @strugee was seeing is just the same behavior as in other Windows installers. If it's worse, please add a comment.

[strugee]

Sorry for the wait guys, I'll test this Real Soon Now™. FWIW, I am running a virus scanner. It never even occurred to me that it might be a bug, hence the wiki update :)

[njx]

@strugee No problem! Thanks for following up.

[strugee]

OK, I timed this without a virus scanner. It took about 10 minutes 7 seconds. I've never seen results like this. I'm going to do a benchmark of Firefox Nightly's install now, for comparison. I'm on an XPS 13, btw.

[strugee]

I've done this test. (Almost) same conditions: Nightly was completely uninstalled and reinstalled from scratch, using the full installer from nightly.mozilla.org (not the Express installer). The only difference was that I had the anti-virus running, but that should only have impacted the test negatively, not positively.

The results: I got a UAC prompt immediately after Nightly finished self-extracting.

The conclusion: there is definitely something very wrong here.

[njx]

Deeply weird. Thanks Windows!

I wonder if it's reproducible with other apps that use the same installer (Wix) that we do, although I don't know offhand what else you could test. @peterflynn - do you know of other apps that use Wix that would be easy to get hold of and install?

[peterflynn]

@njx Wix isn't part of the installer, it's just the build tool. The installer is native MSI technology, which is what most (but not all) Windows installers use.

I think we should try to figure out what's different about this user's system, since 10 minutes is obviously wayyy not the typical experience for our installer...