Zotero keeps uninstalling itself

jimbocalvo
Hi there,
I keep having an issue where Zotero appears to be uninstalling itself.

At first I thought it was the auto-update feature attempting to update but then failing (removal would work but installation of update would fail).

But I have just had it happen again on a couple of machines running 5.0.88 and on one I had set the following in the Advanced Configuration

app.update.auto to false
app.update.enabled to false

Any idea what could be triggering Zotero to remove itself? The Program Folders and registry keys are all tidied up as if an uninstallation has been initiated.

thanks,
  • dstillman
    edited July 16, 2020
    It's not Zotero. The only way for program files and registry keys to be removed is to run the uninstaller, and Zotero can't run its own uninstaller. The in-app update mechanism has nothing whatsoever to do with the installer/uninstaller.
  • emilianoeheyns
    Is this computer under management by a corporate IT department?
  • jimbocalvo
    Yes, by me, I'm the SCCM administrator for my organisation, I package up all our applications and out of the 200 I've packaged, this is the only one I've had an issue with
  • emilianoeheyns
    Since Zotero doesn't ever uninstall itself (only the uninstaller does that, and Zotero doesn't run it), the most plausible candidate is still the packaging. We don't use SCCM anymore in our corp, but the reason I asked is that we've had instances where applications (not Zotero, our corp packages something else, would have to ask what) ended up somewhere that was cleaned up on logout. I don't know the details unfortunately, as I worked only occasionally with the packaging crew. But the first thing I'd look at is where Zotero gets installed.
  • StephenPowley
    I had a very similar problem and shared this thread with my IT department. Here's their feedback on their fix in case it might be useful to others:
    "We had set Zotero to supersede older versions in SCCM, the issue we have with this (and why it keeps uninstalling) is it installs in the same folder for every version. So it was detecting the new version as the old version and uninstalling it.
  • emilianoeheyns
    edited yesterday at 2:21pm
    I would say that that is pretty dense behavior by SCCM.
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