It seems that whenever I try to uninstall an app it fails. There is not much to say except that when uninstall is selected it spends a little bit of time spinning its' wheels and then displays a dialogue box that says "Unable to uninstall appname" where appname corresponds to the name of the portableapp for which uninstall was selected.
New: Kanri (Oct 9, '24), Platform 29.5.3 (Jun 27, '24)
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If you're unable to delete AppName Portable within the menu, can you delete the folder PortableApps\AppNamePortable within Windows Explorer? If you can't, then the menu can't delete it either and it's likely either a permissions issue or a drive issue. Is it every app?
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I haven't tried every app but have attempted about a half dozen and they all fail in the same manner. I haven't been able to get any to uninstall.
Something that I do which might differ from other users is that I run normally as a "standard" user as opposed to an "administrator". Therefore, I opted to switch to a user that is an "administrator" and try the same thing there. The result is the same. When I attempt to move the portable app folder, using Windows Explorer, I am prompted for the admin password when running as a standard user whereas this doesn't happen when running as administrator.
I should point out that all of my portable apps were installed when running as "standard" user.
Removing the portable app's folder does seem to have the desired affect. If this is considered a legitimate technique then that's fine with me. Wouldn't want some other problem to subsequently be blamed on my failure to operate my portable apps correctly.
You've somehow messed up the permissions on the folders containing your apps, likely due to the change in user accounts. If this is an external drive, the easiest way to fix it is to right-click the drive in Explorer and set the Everyone special access user to Full Control.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Doing what is suggested has the affect of permitting uninstall to work but it wasn't painless and who knows what future problems might arise. In this case the drive is a pretty good size (128GB) USB flash memory stick with lots of files. It looked like this operation involved making a change to every file. It took about half an hour to run.
While this is useful to know it is not very comforting. It would be true that Windows file system security is sufficiently complicated as to defy complete understanding. The drive in question is intended to be very portable. In this case that includes using the same drive on computers operated by different operating systems (OS). Each OS has its' own issues which somewhat defies that intention. Also, I've formatted the drive as NTFS in order to overcome file size restrictions associated with FAT32. This may also be something that is a bit out of the norm for portable apps users.
With that said, it is still a mystery why it is possible to install portable apps without any problem but then doing the uninstall of the same app on the same computer and OS by the same user (i.e., security credentials) encounters such a problem. If there is a secret for avoiding such issues it would be nice to know. If portable apps can figure out what's wrong and offer some up front advice on how to avoid that would also be GREAT.
Thanks for the help!!!
The default for formatting flash drives as NTFS in Windows is to have the drive set with Everyone having Full Access for Windows 7 and later (possibly even Vista). It looks like your drive was likely formatted incorrectly or the permissions set incorrectly at some point. None of our software or tools make changes to the permissions of anything on the drive other than setting the base PortableApps folder and Documents/Videos/Music/Pictures to READONLY which causes their custom icons to show up (same as your Documents, Videos, Music, etc folders work). This setting does not cause the behavior you experienced.
While Windows defaults to formatting flash drives as FAT32 or ExFAT by default, formatting as NTFS isn't an issue as long as the permissions are kept at their defaults. Otherwise, if you move from one PC where login Bob owns all the files to another PC, lots of stuff won't work right even if that other PC has a login Bob with the exact same password.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!