Bulgarian mirror 10 Gbps

PuTTY bug win-silent-uninstall

Home | FAQ | Feedback | Licence | Updates | Mirrors | Keys | Links | Team
Download: Stable · Snapshot | Docs | Changes | Wishlist

The PuTTY .exe uninstaller has a /silent switch (and some others such as /verysilent); however, before 0.68, none of these actually allows a silent uninstall, as the user is always prompted to decide whether they want to remove all traces of PuTTY use (saved sessions and random seed file) from the machine:

PuTTY Uninstallation

Remove saved sessions and random seed file?

If you hit Yes, ALL Registry entries associated
with PuTTY will be removed, as well as the
random seed file. THIS PROCESS WILL
DESTROY YOUR SAVED SESSIONS.
(This only affects the currently logged-in user.)

If you hit No, uninstallation will proceed, but
saved sessions etc will be left on the machine.

Last time we looked, this was unavoidable with the Inno Setup installer engine we were using (the "skipifsilent" flag was not supported in the [UninstallRun] section), as long as we wanted to offer this choice to users uninstalling interactively.

This is fixed in 0.67 by the provision of a MSI installer (which doesn't offer the option of clearing out old settings at all -- it always leaves them alone). The Inno Setup (.exe) installer still has this problem in 0.67.

For existing installations of the Inno Setup installer where you want to silently migrate to the MSI installer (which requires uninstalling the Inno Setup one first) or just uninstall, there are a couple of options:

• The final release of the Inno Setup installer, 0.68, does not prompt to remove settings (it will always leave them alone). So you'll be able to (silently) install that, then silently uninstall it.
  (The MSI installer does not have this option either; we've decided it's not sensible, given that it didn't remove all users' settings, only the current user's settings. If you want settings removed, you must run 'putty -cleanup' before uninstallation.)
• If you don't want to involve post-0.67 installers, a workaround is apparently to delete putty.exe (which is invoked to put up the prompt) before starting the uninstall process. This is described in more detail here.

(A suspected problem with the Inno Setup to MSI migration is that if a program such as Pageant is running at the time you run the Inno Setup uninstaller, the machine can end up with no Pageant; we think the Inno Setup uninstaller leaves a note to remove the currently-in-use pageant.exe on next reboot, which the MSI installer is unaware of, so the MSI's pageant.exe gets removed. Or something like that.)

(The git commit id listed in Fixed-in is actually after 0.67, even though 0.67 has an MSI installer. That's not an error; I prepared the 0.67 MSI ad-hoc, after 0.67 itself was released.)