A message popped up halfway through the installation telling me to close Freeware Update to continue the installation. That sounded a bit weird as the installation of the (same) program was not finished yet. I clicked on the OK button only to be greeted with the same message again.

It got a bit silly after pressing ok for about ten times. Next stop was the Windows Task Manager which only listed the installer of the program as open. I figured that something went wrong, killed the setup in the task manager and started the installation again. The result was unfortunately the same. Last chance was to run the installer as administrator which – again – led to the error message.

It can be that the program is not compatible with Windows 7. But the developer’s have not added any compatibility information to their website so that this was impossible to check. A likely reason is a check if the program is running. Maybe that check does only look for the Window title and figured that the installer was actually the main program. Checked the forum to find a post of a user who reported the same problem. It is apparently possible to run the installer in safe mode. The user also mentioned that older versions did not have the problem.

Whatever it is I quickly killed the process, deleted the program and decided to stop wasting my time with a program that simply would not work for me.

Update: Freeware Updater is no longer available. The website and software have been discontinued. Check out programs like Secunia Online Software Inspector, Updates Notifier or SUMO for viable alternatives.

The Windows Installer CleanUp Utility has been developed by Microsoft as a tool to clean a computer system after a failed installation of a software program using the Windows installer. The computer program will display a list of all applications that have been installed using Windows Installer giving the user the option to remove their installers properly from the computer system.

It is possible to select one or multiple programs from the list for removal. The cleanup program will then remove the installation files from the computer system so that it can be removed or installed properly. Microsoft advises to not use the program to cleanup Office 2007 installers this way. The reason for this is that it can happen that installers can become corrupted so that it becomes impossible to remove the program from the operating system.

The Windows Installer CleanUp Utility is compatible (via 4 Sysops) with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system.

Users who double-click on the msi file directly will also install the application but with the possibility that it will not run properly on the computer system. Take a computer program that requires the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5 for example. If the user has an older version of the framework installed setup.exe will download the files needed and launch the installation of the compatible framework and launch the installation using the msi file afterwards.

If the user installs using the msi file the installation will go through without problems but might experience an application crash or warning message while starting the application. It is therefor recommend on end user systems to always install applications using the setup.exe file if both a setup.exe and xyz.msi are available after unpacking the software program.

There are even some msi setup files out there that will not perform the installation upon execution but request an installation using the setup.exe file instead to ensure that all necessary components are installed.