Some serious exe weirdness.

F

fleggett

Gawd
Joined
Nov 30, 2004
Messages
546
Has anyone experienced this? I was upgrading an E7450 Latitude to Windows 10 via a clean install and downloaded the Intel Thermal Framework from the relevant support section of Dell's website. I did this via Edge. I then moved the driver executable to another partition where I keep files separate from the OS. I then tried to run said executable (after it was moved).

The driver complained that it couldn't find a file and bombed out. I don't know why I thought to try this, but I moved the driver executable back to its original downloaded location and ran it again. This time, it was successful and installed the Thermal Framework just fine.

This kinda blew my mind. What could be causing this? A bizarre permissions problem? Could the driver executable be so poorly coded that it can only be run from the OS partition? I'd really appreciate some insight to this. Thanks in advance.
 
Didn't work, same problem. The logfile states:

"Shell Execute Error. System error text = The system cannot find the file specified."

This is so bizarre.
 
Well, I think I've narrowed it down to a problem with the Dell Update Packages currently offered on Dell's support page for this laptop. Every one of them is failing with this same error when moved to a different partition. However, they install fine from the original download location.
 
Probably a badly coded installer that doesnt always extract files to the expected place. Looks like it uses the default path rather than setting it explicitly.
At least you have a solution.
Might be an idea to tell Dell.
 
If you still have the file you downloaded, right click on it and choose properties. If there is an unblock option, use it.
 
The laptop has since "moved on" (I was upgrading it for a friend), but I'll try that on another machine. I didn't know there was a block/unblock option associated with file properties.
 
The unblock button might not be there... it really depends on how the file was downloaded. If it came down from the internet in an untrusted zone, IE will flag it with metadata that will follow the file around while it hangs out on NTFS file systems.

It's always worth checking if you're having weird issues, as this causes the exe to run in different security contexts.
 
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