torkell: (Default)
[personal profile] torkell
Google's autoupdater is a persistent little git, I'll give it that.

The old version of the toolbar is stored as C:\Program Files\Google\GoogleToolbar1.dll. What appears to happen is the updater creates GoogleToolbar2.dll, and registers that in COM. No idea if the old file is deregistered.

Plan A of reregister the old version and hope it didn't notice was doomed from the beginning. The updater saw through that attempt and behaved as normal

Plan B of the same, but then copy the old to where it expects the new and deny writes using NTFS permissions also failed. Instead of creating GoogleToolbar2.dll, GoogleToolbar3.dll was created.

Plan C, however, involves following Plan A and then using NTFS permissions to deny all modifications to the entirety of C:\Program Files\Google.
This appears to be quite successful. The updater can't really do anything if it can't create the new file, or modify or delete the old one. Worst it can do is clobber the registery settings for the toolbar. And that can probably be fixed by applying a similar ACL to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google.

Autoupdate that, Google!

From Dom - your housemate

Date: 2006-10-17 10:28 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
Why not rename the one you want as the one it is currently? I imagine the updater is not looking at the contents of the file - so much as the *name* of the file.

Date: 2006-10-17 10:33 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ralesk.livejournal.com

Yeah… my dad’s been really annoyed by this behaviour lately as well. Not to mention that the new toolbar doesn’t import his look-and-feel options and clutters everything :/

Date: 2006-10-17 11:09 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ralesk.livejournal.com

Haha, that icon still strikes me with the “huh! did I post?” feeling XD

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