MSDE sp3 Installation Hangs

[Nathan Blomquist]

I am having trouble installing MSDE. I am attempting to launch the installation via another setup program I am writing. This setup will install a lot of prerequisites that another app needs, one of them being MSDE. The problem is that when I launch the MSDE installation all goes well until a little over half way through, when it just hangs. Nothing happens, ever. I can do this repeatably. I can call the setup.exe from C#, MC++ using .NET and using Win32, and also straight Win32. All cause the installation to hang. It seems to have to do with waiting for the process to finish, because if I don't use Process.WaitForExit or WaitForSingleObject the installation will continue and finish even if launched from my app. But calling these functions causes a hang. Here is another post about Delphi: link[^] Here is a Win32 DLL function that I wrote (took from the above post, he said it worked for him) that causes the problem.

#define APPLICATION NULL
#define COMMANDLINE _T("MSDE\\Setup.exe sapwd=testpassword")
#define CURRENTDIR  NULL

extern "C" __declspec(dllexport) int NativeLaunchMSDEInstaller()
{
	STARTUPINFO si;
	PROCESS_INFORMATION pi;
	DWORD dwExitCode;
	BOOL br;

	ZeroMemory(&si, sizeof(si));
	si.cb = sizeof(si);
	
	br = CreateProcess(APPLICATION, COMMANDLINE, NULL, NULL,
		FALSE, 0, NULL, CURRENTDIR, &si, &pi);
	if (br)
	{
		CloseHandle(pi.hThread);
		WaitForSingleObject(pi.hProcess, INFINITE);
		GetExitCodeProcess(pi.hProcess, &dwExitCode);
	//	wprintf(L"Setup.exe returned exit code %d", dwExitCode);
		CloseHandle(pi.hProcess);
	}
	else
	{
	//	wprintf(L"Error %d in CreateProcess", GetLastError());
		return GetLastError();
	}

	return 0;
}

Thanks for any help (or atleast a verification that this is a problem), Nathan --------------------------- Hmmm... what's a signature?