What's wrong with my customization of Add Remove Programs?

Question

We’re trying to install our MSI without having it listed in Add/Remove Control Panel using (as per documentation I found in the MSDN):

 ARPSYSTEMCOMPONENT=1

We’ll then manually add an entry in the registry (CurrentVersion\Uninstall\SomethingPretty) to our Setup wrapper to handle maintenance modes. But I can’t seem to uninstall this MSI once I set the above property as we get the error "This action is only valid for products that are currently installed. We're just using

 msiexec /x product.msi

Answer

You should specify the ProductCode – not the product.msi itself – as the parameter. Look at some ARP entries for other MSI products installed on the system for some examples.

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[Author: Robert Flaming]

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