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Stop leaving users dead in the water when installer terminates Windows shell #2070
Description
Describe the bug
Open Shell installer terminates Windows shell but finish button does not force a system restart, leaving users dead in the water.
Area of issue
Installation/Other
To reproduce
You know that issue exists
Expected behavior
The finish button on Open Shell installer should force a system reboot, so that users are not left dead in the water because the Open Shell installer terminated the Windows shell
Open-Shell version
4.4.194
Windows version
11 (24H2)
Additional context
Since the Open Shell installer terminated Windows shell, I had to call CMD from Task Manager and then restart the PC with a CMD command. But I guarantee you that most Windows users don't know how to do that and would just power button force off their PC, potentially destroying their Windows install in the process.
Activity
ge0rdi commentedon Dec 23, 2024
So the installer detected that some files are still in use and offered to restart applications that use them (Explorer?), but then Explorer was not restarted for some reason, right?
There are such reports from time to time.
Though it is not expected at all and hard to reproduce (thus investigate).
System reboot is usually not needed when "Close applications and attempt to restart them" is selected.
MSI installer should simply just restart those applications and that's it. This is how it normally works.
We should rather (somehow) detect whether Explorer is running after installer finishes and if not then start it.
Ulti-P-Uszer commentedon Dec 25, 2024
I first restarted the shell form Task Manager and it went into an instant continuous crash & restart loop. It was at that time I called CMD from Task manager & restarted the PC from CMD.
ge0rdi commentedon Dec 26, 2024
I guess you don't happen to have crash dumps from that situation ...
They could help with diagnosing the issue. As it is not normal for explorer to behave that way.
In any case, if the explorer crashes in loop then there is hardly anything we can do about it (starting it manually would result in crash).
Ulti-P-Uszer commentedon Dec 26, 2024
packetdog commentedon Jan 1, 2025
I experienced this for the first time yesterday. I've been trying to script updating OpenShell silently so we can push it out at scale. I have a script that calls the installer with the /qn switch, and that does in fact upgrade it. It did not restart explorer however, as I've seen happen in the past with upgrading with the GUI installer. So as I usually do (when this has happened before), I launched task manager, and ran explorer, but this time it seemed to crash-loop. I then reopened task manager and ran a shutdown /r /f /t 0 and the machine didn't shut down but in fact continued explorer-crash-looping. I started closing Chrome windows out that were running and all of a sudden explorer loaded with OpenShell running normally. I restarted anyway after that without any issues. This was on a Windows 10 21H2 install which I just updated to 22H2 and it seems to be working fine.
FWIW, I tried adding a line to restart explorer in my script, but based on the fact that it caused an explorer crash loop, I'm not sure it's the best idea. Maybe I should kill explorer first, then call the installer, then restart it.. or check if it's running then restart if not.