Mailbag: Benign errors appear in the log file when uninstalling Visual Studio 2005

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Question:

I recently uninstalled Visual Studio 2005 from one of my systems, and I am trying to determine if the uninstall completed successfully.  The setup UI reports success, but when I look at the verbose uninstall log (located at %temp%\vsmsilog*.txt), I see several error messages that look like the following:

Action start 10:04:36: DDSE_CA_Uninstall_InstallExecuteSequenceStarts.
01/25/07 10:04:36 DDSet_Status: LANGID: 1033
01/25/07 10:04:36 DDSet_Entry: ImmediateDispatch: DDSE_CA_Uninstall_InstallExecuteSequenceStarts entry
01/25/07 10:04:36 DDSet_Status: patch uninstall Directory = 'C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\SE\VS_PRO_1033_X86_CD_8_0'
01/25/07 10:04:36 DDSet_Status: LoadLibrary('C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\SE\VS_PRO_1033_X86_CD_8_0\worker.dll')
01/25/07 10:04:36 DDSet_Warning: Setup failed to load the DLL at 'C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\SE\VS_PRO_1033_X86_CD_8_0\worker.dll'. System error: The specified module could not be found.

What do these errors mean, and will they cause any problems on my system?

Answer:

Any warnings that refer to a file named worker.dll are benign and do not have any effect on the Visual Studio uninstall process.  There are a series of custom actions included in Visual Studio setup that attempt to load a DLL and perform some processing to help configure hotfixes and service packs.  This mechanism is designed to be a hook in case we find some problematic hotfix install/uninstall problems that can only be fixed by writing some custom code that will be run during setup.  If/when we find a scenario where we need to do this, we will include a copy of worker.dll in the hotfix installation process, and then when that hotfix is uninstalled or Visual Studio itself is uninstalled, the code in the worker.dll will be executed.

If we do not end up finding any scenarios where we need to ship a worker.dll, then uninstalling Visual Studio will simply log the failure to load that DLL and continue on with the uninstall process.