Windows Vista compatibility

The apps have all been tested on Vista and work as expected. The apps DO NOT install themselves and then uninstall. They run from the portable drive and copy a couple files into TEMP while running. The error is on the part of Vista in terms of detecting it as a failed install.

Keep in mind that Vista is only a release candidate and not intended for ANY production use. The only Vista box you'll encounter before January/February 2007 will be one you own... and even after that, they will be few and far between (I know of no companies or universities planning on upgrading within the first 6 months). Most software does not yet support Vista (including Firefox) though it may happen to work correctly at the moment.

As Vista solidifies more and works out more of its bugs (it's still pretty buggy... and I have RC1 for testing), we'll do more work around getting Vista to work right with portable apps. I'm planning on having it be ironed out around the time Vista finally releases next year.

Actually, if you know of any resources on how Vista determines if a file is an installer and if it failed, please share them. From what I've determined, it looks like Vista uses "heuristics" to determine if it's an installer or not, based on the installers out there. In other words, there's no standard way to indicate whether it's an installer or not and if Vista is too dumb to figure it out right (which it is in this case), you're out of luck. Heck, part of the way it determines it is by looking for the word "setup" or "install" in the exe name... so it's not really that bright.

Ok, so it looks like with the addition of a manifest, we may be able to avoid the issue on Vista. I had to manually hack it in with Resource Hacker because NSIS doesn't yet support manifests (since they're still in flux as Vista solidifies) and disable the launcher's CRC check (leaving it more vulnerable to virus infections).

Anyway, I hacked the Firefox Portable Launcher from the current Firefox Portable 1.5.0.7 Pre-Release build (which should be the final version) to include a manifest for Vista. Grab yourself a copy of Firefox Portable 1.5.0.7 Pre-Release from the Beta Forum and then add the launcher below to the FirefoxPortable directory. Use it to launch Firefox Portable rather than the existing one.

Firefox Portable Launcher 1.3.0.0 with Vista manifest hacked on:
https://portableapps.com/temp/FirefoxPortable1300VistaHack.exe

Please let me know if it works as expected.

A workaround is to create a manifest yourself ... this same code should work for any portable application

Create the following file in notepad:
============================BEGIN BELOW===========================

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0">
	<assemblyIdentity version="1.0.0.0"
         processorArchitecture="X86" 
         name="Sample" 
         type="win32" />
	<description>Test Application</description>
	<trustInfo xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3">
		<security>
			<requestedPrivileges>
				<requestedExecutionLevel level="asInvoker" />
			</requestedPrivileges>
		</security>
	</trustInfo>
</assembly>

============================END ABOVE===========================

Save it as <executablename>.exe.manifest in the same folder as the executable.

Then run the portable executable and UAC promt should go away.

miji2

This is one of the reasons I will not be upgrading to Vista for as long as possible... Too many changes to have to fix.

In case folks looking at this topic missed it, I released the first Vista-compatible launcher here:
https://portableapps.com/node/3425