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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T08:10:13+00:00

I’m writing an installer on NSIS that registers a shell extension. On uninstall and

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I’m writing an installer on NSIS that registers a shell extension.

On uninstall and upgrade, the old extension can’t be deleted/overwritten since explorer.exe locks it, and killing-restarting the process is ruled out.

So I extract the new extension with a different name, mark the old extension for deletion (uninstall/upgrade) and rename the new extension to its original name (upgrade only) via PendingFileRenameOperations registry key. So far, this works fine.

The problem is, I have to register the new shell component on startup, since PendingFileRenameOperations only works on reboot. Is there a way to schedule a regsvr32 operation after rebooting?

I can’t depend on doing this via a .bat execution on RunOnce, since logging off/logging on also triggers RunOnce operations.

Thanks in advance.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The simplest way I have found to resolve this issue, is to create a registry script that deletes all related registry keys and values. Run the registry script in the (un-)installer, and schedule a “delete on boot” for the COM DLLs. There might be a better way to do this, but I have yet to find it.

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