fix(windows): avoid terminating unrelated app instances - #358
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Aug 2, 2026
Both flows could leave a machine in a state with no supported way out. **Uninstall removed the registry entries first.** An unelevated uninstall of a Program Files install deleted the Add/Remove Programs key and the shortcuts, then spawned a batch script whose every `del` and `rmdir` was silenced with `> nul 2>&1`. The files stayed on disk, the app was gone from Add/Remove Programs, and `handle.exit(0)` ran regardless — `uninstall_app` always returned `Ok(())`, so nothing was ever reported. A deletability precheck now runs before anything is touched, the script logs each step to a temp file instead of discarding the output, and it restores the uninstall entry if deletion fails. Registry cleanup happens last. **Install had no rollback.** The executable was copied at step 2, but the Add/Remove Programs entry was not written until step 6. Any failure in between — most likely creating a shortcut in a locked-down Public Desktop — aborted the `?` chain with the exe in place, so `is_installed()` reported true by path match and the installer UI never appeared again, while nothing had ever been registered. Elevation is now checked before the first mutation, and completed steps are undone in reverse on failure. An update/repair never deletes what it was updating. The script keeps the process handling introduced by #358: it waits for its own process id to disappear and never matches on the image name, so a portable copy, another user's session, or a second window with unsaved work survives an uninstall. That wait is now bounded — reaching the deletion attempt, which logs and restores the uninstall entry, beats an invisible batch file spinning forever. Also in these paths: - `restore_file_association` opened keys with `create_subkey`, so uninstalling materialised `HKLM\Software\Classes\.md` and `.markdown` on machines where Markpad had never registered them, then deleted a default value that did not exist. It now opens read/write and returns early when the key is absent. The other hive is cleaned too, but only when no installation is registered there — otherwise an all-users uninstall would break a coexisting per-user install and leave `.md` pointing at a ProgID that no longer exists. - The helper process was launched by bare name, so the process search order checked the application and current directories before `%PATH%` — a planted `wscript.exe` would run with whatever privileges the uninstall had. It, and `tasklist`, `find`, `timeout` and `reg` inside the batch, are now resolved through `%SystemRoot%\System32`. The temp script names carry random suffixes and are created with `create_new` instead of being fixed and overwritable. - Permission failures return an `ELEVATION_REQUIRED:` code. The installer UI matched on the literal string `Access is denied`, which only appears on English Windows, so localized systems showed the raw exception instead of the "run as administrator" message. The Windows-only logic is extracted into pure functions gated `cfg(any(target_os = "windows", test))` so the ordering, rollback and script generation are exercised by tests on any host. Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This was referenced Aug 3, 2026
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Summary
Uninstall now waits only for the invoking Markpad process to exit before removing its installation directory. It no longer force-terminates every
Markpad.exeprocess, so portable copies and separately opened Markpad instances keep running.Validation
cargo test(23 tests)npm test(142 tests)npm run check(0 errors; one existing Settings modal a11y warning)