Smarterm 7.0 upgrade pains

Wednesday, August 30, 2006
I am having a problem with older machines that still have some remnants of SmarTerm 7.0 on them. When I run your install program it changes the smarterm program to version 7.0 and then we get an stoffice.exe error. We are running version 12.1.1 but there is still a “Persoft” directory on the C: drive and there must be some ini files or registry entries that are re-pointing smarterm to version 7.0, which then errors. We have uninstalled and reloaded several times (that is the only way to get smarterm working again) and have verified that we are installing to all the right folders but there is still a problem somewhere. Aside from re-formatting the hard drive, are there any ideas you have? We don’t have an uninstall program to run on version 7.0.

You might try logging on as an adminstrator, then go into regedit and delete all the smarterm entries from the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT branch:
If you can uninstall smarterm 7.0 that would be good. If the uninstaller is missing you could install 7 over the old one again and then uninstall.
Then make sure to delete the smarterm 7 folder from the program files folder.
After leaving nothing but scorched earth where 7 once was, you can install the 12.
The problem is that previous versions of smarterm would automatically ‘repair’ any broken components as soon as the program runs. This would result in the behaviour you described.
To un-repair 7’s modifications you can go to add remove programs and attempt to repair the 12.0 installation. But if the 7 executable is still sitting around anywhere and gets run, it will break 12 again. Back when I had to ensure compatibility between 7 and 9 and above, I would repeatedly go through this process while testing the different versions.
7 and 12 will never play nice and you have to eradicate 7 from your system manually if the uninstaller fails to do so.

Outlook.jpg