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copied!<p>One thing to note is that MSI is a <strong>release and deployment mechanism</strong> - it is <strong>not</strong> geared towards interactive testing where you install the MSI and then change the installed files afterwards - like you do during development. </p> <p>The whole technology is designed to strictly <strong>install what's in the MSI file</strong> and to <strong>maintain the deployed configuration</strong> and protect it from manual or accidental changes. This can be extremely annoying on systems where manual changes are performed as part of testing or development, but the MSI file is actually just "doing its job".</p> <p>As sacha says there are several ways you can disable or work around this behavior:</p> <ul> <li>Use non-advertised (regular) shortcuts</li> <li>Set the DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS property</li> <li>Launch the EXE file the shortcut points to directly (this bypasses MSI entirely - and can be used to launch the app if the original MSI is missing)</li> </ul> <p>Then there are several more advanced options that isn't really recommended. For example you can identify all the files that may need manual tweaking, and disable the repair behavior specifically for these files. This is generally done by setting a <strong>blank GUID</strong> to the hosting component for the file, or to set the component attribute "never overwrite if key path exists" (<strong>msidbComponentAttributesNeverOverwrite</strong>). There are several other advanced tweaks, but nothing that's really recommendable.</p> <p>Also note that it is not just <strong>advertised shortcuts</strong> that can trigger repair. <strong>Invoking advertised COM servers</strong> or <strong>advertised file extensions</strong> may also trigger self-repair. </p> <p>If you run into a situation where the MSI keeps asking for the source, just uninstall the MSI from add/remove programs to get rid of the program registration on the system. Then you can reinstall it with a freshly built MSI.</p>

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