Stop leaving users dead in the water when installer terminates Windows shell

[Brad-git-man]

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.

[ge0rdi]

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).

The finish button on Open Shell installer should force a system reboot

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.

[Brad-git-man]

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]

I first restarted the shell form Task Manager and it went into an instant continuous crash & restart loop.

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).

[Brad-git-man]

At least when I came back in after forcing a restart with CMD everything was normal. Also my Windows is 10 LTSC 2021 which for over 2 yrs had been running the prior version of Open Shell prob free. It is fully monthly updated, but I don't know if the Windows build being 3 yrs old makes a diff.

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On Thu, Dec 26, 2024 at 10:59 AM ge0rdi ***@***.***> wrote: I first restarted the shell form Task Manager and it went into an instant continuous crash & restart loop. 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). — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#2070 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ANQTUR6Q3FIJSHRKH35DE5L2HQYY5AVCNFSM6AAAAABUCTDDS6VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMZDKNRSHE2TEOBSHA> . You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[packetdog]

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.