How to resolve “multiple launches of this installer is not allowed“ ?

If you are installing some application packed by InstallAnywhere, and suffer the issue of “mutiple launches of this installer is not allowed” (不允许多次启动此安装程序。安装程序现将退出。), then this article is for you.

The error message, “multiple launches of this installer is not allowed” is used to make sure only one installer can be executed at a time, this is the dedicated user scenarios.

The topic of this article is to discuss why the error message popup even if you are exeucting only the copy of the installer. Before give the solutions, let me give some background to this issue.

When InstallAnywhere can’t access one or more directories of target PC, it will shows same error message too, which is misunderstanding. So, what directories does InstallAnywhere will use ? The answer is in the log file of InstallAnywhere. Then where is the log file of InstallAnywhere ? That’s depends on the operating system you are using. For Windows OS, it generally under C:\APPLICATION_NAME\Uninstall_APPLICATON_NAME\Logs, with .log as file extension.

If you open the log file, you will see following contents:
user.name == Test
user.home == C:\Users\Test
user.dir == C:\Users\Test\AppData\Local\Temp\

Please make sure these directories exist, and you have the permissions the access these directories, besides, also make sure the security software is shut down.