Aug 29, 2012 - Blocked installs because of operating system version can be quite easily. I typically drop the row to bypass *all* OS version checking. Adding an Operating System Condition for an InstallShield Prerequisite InstallShield 2012 Spring If the InstallShield prerequisite should be installed on some—but not all—operating systems, you can create multiple operating system conditions for the prerequisite.

A customer reported that when their application called the Get­Version­Ex function, it sometimes reported incorrect values. Specifically, the logs collected from clients shows that the first time the program was run on a Windows 7 machine, the operating system was correctly reported as 6.1.7600 (Windows 7), but the second time it was run, the operating system was erroneously reported as 6.0.6000 (Windows Vista).

This was definitely strange behavior, and upon further questioning, the customer admitted that their application was a setup program. The fact that it was a setup program was the missing ingredient. What happened is that the setup program ran, correctly detected the version as Windows 7, and then started installing its pre-requisite components. The installer for one of the pre-requisites failed, causing the entire setup to fail. The noticed that the initial attempt to install the program failed, and it guessed (based on its internal heuristics) that the problem was that the program had an incorrect operating system version check.

After the first setup failed, the Program Compatibility Assistant puts up a dialog box saying, 'Hey, I think I know what went wrong. This setup program has a bad operating system version check. Do you want to give it another shot?' If the client says, 'Go for it', then it will run the setup program again, but with a false operating system version. Unfortunately, the heuristic that the Program Compatibility Assistant used was a false positive in this case, so saying 'Go for it' was the wrong answer. (Not like the client had any idea. This was a case of the computer.) The fix is to add a manifest to the setup program specifying whether it needs to run as administrator.

It doesn't matter what the manifest says as its requirements; the fact that the manifest said anything at all means that the setup program understands the new rules introduced in Windows Vista and doesn't need the Program Compatibility Assistant's help. (You can read for other ways to disable the Program Compatibility Assistant for a program.). @Billy O'Neal It makes sense to say that you should update your manifest with each new tested OS release; that way, when Microsoft release a new Windows version, it can know that you tested against Windows 7 but not against Windows 8.1. This lets the new version limit which shims PCA considers; if you marked it as Windows 7 tested only, it can consider all shims for apps that worked on Windows 7 (excluding shims that don't make sense if you didn't use Windows 8 features), while if you mark it as tested against 8.1, it can consider all shims for apps that work on Windows 8.1, ignoring ones that fix up the differences between Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. Why does the OS need to lie about its age? It is not a middle-aged lady on a dating site.

There are often legitimate needs to know the real version. Sometimes different components need to be installed depending on the version. Sometimes the code needs to behave differently to work around known bugs in specific versions.

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A manifest is not always an option. If you have a DLL that is loaded in an unknown EXE (like if you are a shared component or a shell extension) then you are at the mercy of the hosting process. For example I had a self-registering DLL that had to set different registry keys depending on the version. GetVersion tells lies because regsvr32 doesn’t have a manifest. I had to resort to undocumented ways of getting to the truth (I shall not mention them here). Maybe Vista telling old programs that they are running on XP was warranted, because there was a big difference between the two OSs.

But since then the changes have been mostly evolutionary. Even differences between Windows 7 and Windows 8 were not that big for desktop APIs.

So there can be a new function GetVersionNoLiesPlease, which only programs written post-Vista would know about. #George: To maintain backwards compatibility, of course! Windows has to lie about its version because of the myriads of (setup) programs that do not check correctly. Windows 5.x (2000 and XP) had been around for about seven years (from late 1999 to late 2006), and many programmers that have forgotten there would be a later version got used to write their version checks as (dwMajorVersion == 5), instead of (dwMajorVersion >= 5). When Windows 6.x (Vista, 7, 8, 8.1) came, those checks started failing, and those programs crashed telling they needed at least Windows 2000!

The solution? Detect those programs and lie to them, tell them they are running Windows XP (5.1). The program now runs correctly, and the customer is happy. It seems to me that the situation boils down to 'should there be a compatibility mode on Windows version N that offers the application an environment that looks like a specific version less than N?' If the answer to that is 'yes', then of course the application should be told it's running on the less-than-N version. Otherwise it's in some bizarre nowhere-land that in some places resembles version N, in other places version less than N. My answer to 'should there be' is 'no, let the damn app programmer fix their bugs'.