Why do I need to uninstall Mail Utilities and reboot my server to perform an upgrade?

SYMPTOMS

Mail Utilities' installation program, or the instructions on the website indicate that I must uninstall Exclaimer and reboot my server to perform an upgrade. This is really inconvienient and not something that I can do to a live mail server. Why is there no simple "upgrade" route?

CAUSE

Mail Utilities is a Microsoft Exchange/Windows SMTP event sink program implemented in a DLL. This DLL is loaded and kept open by the system process INETINFO.EXE which prevents any upgrade action or uninstall without releasing the lock on this file.
To cleanly release this file and to ensure that the Windows Installer does not retain a cached copy of the Exclaimer DLL to replace, a reboot is the safest and cleanest route to achieve this.

MORE INFORMATION

DLLs that are locked open by a process during an upgrade operation are marked by the Windows installer for replacement at the next reboot, however, our experience has been that many confusing problems can occur when this route is taken, and so to reduce the instances of peculiar problems during an upgrade, it is necessary to uninstall the previous version.

APPLIES TO

• All versions of Mail Utilities

Article ID: 20040420
Last Reviewed: 14th April 2005
Revision: 1.0