Shortcuts created after setup.exe is run, not working.

[JimiGR1]

After "releasifying" to desired location I run setup.exe in order to install. Program installs and starts successfully. Also shortcuts are created in Start Menu and desktop and by inspecting them, they seem OK. Also "Start In" is filled with the right target and so on....
When I run the shortcuts nothing happens. And when I say nothing I don't mean it starts and fails quietly. I mean NOTHING (Event log doesn't show anything at all, so I suspected there is no execution attempt whatsoever). None of the shortcuts work making Squirrel practically useless.
Current Squirrel.windos version is 1.8.0.

[aaldrich]

@JimiGR1 did you ever find a solution to this? I'm having a similar issue.

[JimiGR1]

Unfortunately not. I had to drop Squirrel for this reason and use another tool for distribution...

[aaldrich]

@JimiGR1 that’s a bummer, can I ask what you used? I will likely need to do the same.

[JimiGR1]

I used Autoupdater.NET.Official since this was a .net winforms project. Easy to install, works like a charm and seems robust. Doesn't work "transparently" as Squirrel though. Dialogs do appear and require user input.

https://www.nuget.org/packages/Autoupdater.NET.Official/

[Thieum]

@JimiGR1 @aaldrich Did the application run on Win7? Did you upgrade from a previous version of Squirrel between versions of your application?

[aaldrich]

@Thieum I never could get it to work correctly, I just had to walk my users through using the versioned exe instead of the shortcut.

[Thieum]

@aaldrich I got the exact same case when upgrading an app on windows 7. The same app was working fine on Windows 10. So maybe if you have the same case, there would be a pattern there. (Maybe the exe stub are not working well in win7 ?)

Another case was an upgrade of squirrel that had no support for exe stub to a one that had. The shortcut were also corrupted.

Could you check where the faulty shortcut is pointing to?

[Thieum]

Github Desktop has the same issue on my computer (win10) actually

Check if you have multiple stubs in your app folder. Maybe there was a rename of your app at some point, and the shortcut hasn't been recreated with the valid stub.

[shiftkey]

@Thieum we're on Squirrel 1.5.2 at the moment, which predates the reported issue.

[Thieum]

possibly linked to #1075