Latest Win10 breaks NSIS installers


Got a call from an IT person who was installing setupBASIC for use by engineers in his company. He reported that the setupBASIC could not be run when double clicked on from the Downloads directory, or anywhere else for that matter. Even if you right click and Run as Administrator.

So for now you have download setupBASIC.exe, Run cmd.exe as an Administrator, then cd to the \users\----\Downloads, and type in setupBASIC to run from the command line.

Running from the command line as Administrator works now!

When you double click on setupBASIC from the File Explorer after a long wait you will get --

Win10broke2

Or from the cmd line in user mode -- Access denied.

Albert the IT guy, made me think about how his company operates. IT has to install all programs. The way setupBASIC works is to install BASICtools in the \Program Files (x86)\Coridium directory, then Examples and Libraries in the \users\----\Documents\Coridium directory. Well that's fine for the IT to run the program, but the other users won't have access to the Examples or Libraries. So I've patched TclTerm.tcl to check for those Examples and Libraries, and if they don't exist in the users Documents directory, it will ask the user to either get a local copy or use the ones in the \Program Files (x86)\Coridium directory. Using the Program Files copy does work, but for ordinary users they can't change those files if they might need to, so it is better to get a local copy, which BASICtools now prompts for.

I've been using the open source NSIS installers for 15 years, and they are by far the simplest way to install WIndows programs, hopefully someone in Redmond will take note and fix their introduced bug. NSIS is a very popular installer.

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