Helen,

 

We’re sorry you’re seeing this error.

 

This problem relates to the User Account Control (UAC) feature that Microsoft introduced in Windows Vista (also present in Windows 7). With UAC, the operating system attempts to detect all changes that could possibly be harmful and either prompt you to allow or deny them (I’m sure you’re familiar with these annoying popups) or automatically deny them. UAC is especially suspicious of programs downloaded from the Internet, for good reason. Because the GeoEco and pywin32 setup programs came from the Internet and are in the form of .exe programs, UAC classifies them in the most suspicious category and automatically prevents them from completing several setup tasks. The particular error message you’re seeing is the GeoEco installer warning that it could not register the GeoEco removal option in the Programs and Features page of the Windows Control Panel. (The message is cryptic; sorry about that, we did not write it.)

 

The workaround to this is to save the GeoEco and pywin32 setup programs to your desktop and run them by right-clicking them and selecting Run As Administrator. This is the “no really, I do want to run these” command that will prevent Windows from trying so hard to protect you.

 

This workaround is documented in the GeoEco installation instructions but we found that many people did not notice it. This is no surprise because those instructions are very long. In GeoEco 0.8 we figured out a way to detect that the setup program was not started using Run As Administrator. The 0.8 setup will fail if it was not done. (This was not introduced in to relatively recent alpha releases of 0.8; probably 0.8 alpha 5).

 

The detection code does not exist in 0.7. Currently we have no plan to go back and re-release 0.7 with it in there. We’re trying to get 0.8 out the door so that people will start using it as the default release.

 

The long term solution is to change the setup program from a .exe to a .msi installer. Windows recognizes .msi installers and does not automatically deny parts of them even when they come from the Internet. But this is a non trivial change for us because we’re relying on Python itself to generate the setup program for us and it appears that if we told it to generate a .msi rather than a .exe, we would lose the capabilities to have the setup program detect other possible problems, such as pywin32 or ArcGIS not being installed. Until we understand how to work around that, we will stick with the .exe installer.

 

It does appear that these problems are solved with Python 2.6. ArcGIS 10 uses Python 2.6, so the version of GeoEco that supports ArcGIS 10 should not have this problem (we hope).

 

Best regards,

 

Jason

 

 

Sir/Madam,p
I have tried downloding GeoEco-0.7.win32-py2.5.exe, but have come up with the problem shown in the image attacted. Prior
to this error message were another two that were both similar but were concerning the python and pywin downloads. I don't have the program already installed, despite this it asks me to remove it. I have arc version 9.3, and have downloaded version 2.5 of python and 2.5 pywin-214.

any ideas or suggestions?

Helen
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Helen McKenzie