In the last few months I've had several incidences where plugins didn't work on my Win 7 system after installation just because the developers created their installers under the wrong assumption that the user account installing the software is the one that will run the software in the end.
I, for example, have a user "Admin" (with admin privileges) and a user "Andre" (without admin privileges). I use "Admin" to install stuff and "Andre" to use stuff.
Here are some examples:
1) The installer of the Melda Production's MCreativeBundle stores shared resources in a directory under %APPDATA% (typically c:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming on Vista/Win 7) which is only accessible by the current user. No other user account can use the plugin unless all necessary files are manually copied to the respective user's %APPDATA%. See this thread
2) The Zen installer has the same issue: shared data is stored in %APPDATA%, see this thread
3) Now I bought the IK Multimedia T-RackS Shell and 670 no-brainer and when I tried to use them I got several errors ("T-RackS 3 has not been properly installed" and "VPA plugin rejected VPA host"). You guessed it: a user-account related issue. In this case it's even worse: IK also writes required, shared information to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive. I fixed it by copying the respective registry entries to the proper place for the normal user. Also it stores the factory presets in %USERPROFILE%\Documents (c:\Users\<username>\Documents), which means that all users except the user that installed the s/w won't have any factory presets. Again, copying the files over to the other user's account fixes this.
I kindly ask all developers to use the directory and registry structures in the way they are supposed to be used. It's not difficult. Here are some hints:
- %APPDATA% is meant for application data that is specific for the current user (like settings). This data is typically only used internally by the program and does not contain user-generated content. An application should be able to create reasonable defaults for this data if the folder does not exist yet (first start as a user).
- %USERPROFILE%\Documents is a great place for user-generated content (documents, custom presets)
- %PROGRAMDATA%, %PROGRAMFILES(X86) and %PROGRAMFILES% are the places to store shared data for an application (e.g. skins). The difference between %PROGRAMDATA% and %PROGRAMFILES(X86)/%PROGRAMFILES% is a bit esoteric: the former is supposed for content (e.g. factory presets), the latter for stuff that is related to program execution (esp. binaries).
- HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE is the registry equivalent to %APPDATA%
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE is the comparable to %PROGRAMFILES%
Regards,
Andre