[MSH] Possible install bug: MSH install always resets ExecutionPolicy

After installing build 7487 I noticed that
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSH\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.Management.Automation.msh\ExecutionPolicy
was reset from RemoteSigned to Restricted.

Since it appears the whole MSH key is deleted during uninstall, I first
tried uninstalling again and manually setting the value to RemoteSigned to
see if it is preserved. The value isn't preserved; it is always overwritten.

Is the intent that MSH will always delete the key contents and always
overwrite ExecutionPolicy while installing? It's not a significant issue
during beta, and I can even see why it may be a valuable possible choice
during upgrades/reinstalls, but automatically working this way will cause
potentially significant inconveniences to people using it in the field,
particularly in WAN support scenarios. Any thoughts on this? Also, are there
any workarounds that will allow overriding this behavior with a custom
commandline for the installer? If the intent IS to make this default
behavior, a simple workaround to force custom upgrade would probably
mitigate most problems.

 

Hi Alex,
We have discussed allowing configuring ExcutionPolicy during setup but we
have not had lot of feedback around this. Can you post a bug on it and can
folks vote on it?

Abhishek Agrawal [MSFT]
MSH Team
Microsoft Corporation
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

Will do, as soon as I figure out how to use the new bugging system. Yes, I'm
lazy.

The more I look at this, however, the more I focus on the issue of
overwriting pre-existing settings. Has that had any separate discussion? It
looks to me like we have some weird potential issues that are due to the
nature of typical Windows Installer behavior. This may be worth a separate
post completely to outline some things after I've looked though the Windows
Installer documentation some more.

 

Done; I focused on the issue of ExecutionPolicy reset/loss rather than the
need for a custom setting.
MSH Registry Customizations Removed/Overwritten during Uninstall/Reinstall
https://connect.microsoft.com/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?SiteID=99&FeedbackID=60862

 

I think I would go for the customizing of the setup,
as I suppose that V2 does have an Upgrade possibility that reserves
settings (uninstall not needed) ;-)
as I do an uninstall I would expect all settings gone.

but if I deploy MSH, I would might like to customize it, would be a
stopper if my scripts could not run (to set it) untill this was set.

Gr /\/\o\/\/

 

Perhaps the ExecutionPolicy should be per user instead of machine wide.
Then it would make more sense to keep the user's current settings. Voted.

 

That is exactly the scenario I had in mind. Today if you deploying Msh on a
new machine, you cannot use it to run scripts till you ran a secondary thing
to set ExecutionPolicy. We essentially force a post-install step and the
installer itself seems like a good place to put it.

Abhishek Agrawal [MSFT]
MSH Team
Microsoft Corporation
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no
rights.