Still unsolved since 2015 NetBeans: Bug 251538 – Your Installer is Creating Invalid Data for the NoModify DWORD Key which crashes enumeration of the Uninstall Key in at least PowerShell
Posted by jpluimers on 2021/03/23
Lovely. Having a bug reported to you in 2015, and acknowledged, that makes software crash and not fixing it.
For NetBeans (still one of the major IDEs) and related stuff like GlassFish, this is too true (a workaround is in the Solution steps
) below: [WayBack] Bug 251538 – Your Installer is Creating Invalid Data for the NoModify DWORD Key which crashes enumeration of the Uninstall Key in at least PowerShell, and copied to [WayBack] [NETBEANS-2523] Netbeans 64-bit creates invalid nomodify value in windows registry for years – ASF JIRA.
This one appears for instance when running choco install --yes jre8
(but is certainly not limited to it) as it inspects uninstall registry values which have been corrupted and resulted into [WayBack] “Specified cast is not valid” on jre8 upgrade · Issue #18 · proudcanadianeh/ChocoPackages · GitHub.
Anyway: back to the NoModify
issue:
phansson 2015-06-23 13:35:00 UTCSee https://bitbucket.org/phansson/nbi-native-jnilib-windows for a fix to this problem. Honestly the sole reason why that project exists was that I had to have this problem fixed as our corporate customers were complaining about our software "messing up their Registry" and we could not wait for NetBeans team to fix the problem.Any update on this? I lost 1 hour finding why the Get-ItemProperty of Chocolatey failed and found this. Then I remembered that I had the same issue one year ago... This issue is now 2 years old, the fix is a one-liner. Is there any plan to fix this or (I am just curious) is Netbeans project dead?We encounter this too. Machines with Netbeans installed on our network often encounter issues when IT roll out software installs. Fix has been to remove and recreate the offending key. If this has been known since 2015, is there any intention of fixing it ?
I encountered it in 2019, when switching my JRE installations to become chocolatey based.
Solution steps
- Run the script mentioned in [WayBack] powershell – How to resolve “ERROR: Specified cast is not valid.” error during installation? – Super User:
Run the below:
Get-ItemProperty HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\* | % { write-host "Key Name:" $_.PSChildName }
This should return some results, then, will return the
Specified cast
error. The error will occur on the key harboring the invalid subkey. - Then inspect the keys after that in regedit, and watch for any value of type
REG_DWORD
with a value(invalid DWORD (32-bit) value)
(usually namedNoModify
- Note those keys, and find them in
appwiz.cpl
- Uninstall the accompanying software
On my systems
Delete the below pieces of crap.
Then run choco install --yes jre8
again.
- Glassfish
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\nbi-glassfish-mod-3.1.43.0.0
- NetBeans IDE
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\nbi-nb-base-7.0.0.0.0
Luckily, the NetBeans uninstaller can uninstall GlassFish at the same time:
Do not re-install, as they re-insert the corrupt data.
–jeroen