Software Deployment

yes, UILevel is stored in a property

That's not the recommended way to stop product removal, though. Use ARPNOREMOVE

Thank you for the quick respone aogilmor.

I have already enabled ARPNoRemove but that doesn't prevent someone from running msiexec /x on the MSI, right? I.e. doing so will still run an uninstall....?

First, properties are case sensitive so it's ARPNOREMOVE

I don't know about msiexec /x, I imagine it would still work. You want to have SOME way of removing the product, right? -- just not have it displayed in control panel for the users.

If you absolutely, positively don't ever want it removed you could probably insert a Custom Action Type 19 with a condition REMOVE="ALL", which would terminate the uninstall. Better make sure it's a good package before you put that in though :-)

I don't know about msiexec /x, I imagine it would still work.Indeed it would.

Thinking around Owen's solution, you could have some sort of property-driven override so that an uninstall could still take place. For example, you could set up a property 'REALLYUNINSTALL' with a value '0' as default. Then, go with Owen's solution but add another check, this time for REALLYUNINSTALL still being '0'. If it is, then terminate. If it isn't (the property and a non-zero value having been passed on the command line or via a transform), then proceed as normal and uninstall.

Lot of hoops to jump, just to prevent an uninstall, though....do your users have local admin privileges? If they don't, why worry?

The MSI will run on servers. One of the things this MSI performs is the creation of local security groups that are mandatory on all servers. There is no logic to delete these security groups so uninstalling it will not in effect delete these security groups. With the MSI being installed, I thought it would be a good indicator that the server is compliant (or at least was at one time).