Delphi 2009 Installation Experience

This was a mixed bag so far. On the plus side it indeed was faster and less convoluted than the Delphi 2007 install. Also, it appears to have produced a working installation eventually. But…

I have installed Delphi 2009 Professional myself on two different machines now. A co-worker did the same on his own machine. On all three machines the main install was not successful initially, failing to install the "dbpack" component for some unexplained reason. Also, after the main installer was finished all three machines rebooted without warning or a prompt to delay the reboot. All open apps were simply terminated hard as soon as I hit the Finish button and Windows went into shutdown.

After the reboot I manually installed the dbpack as recommended in the preceding error message. This worked flawlessly. On my home machine I had to reboot again after this was done. At least this time it gave me a chance to first save my work and reboot when I was ready.

Help installation took a while longer than the main installer but otherwise also worked flawlessly. Online registration also was no problem on all three machines using existing CDN account data.

Checking for and installing the updates did not work out of the box on the two machines here at work, both failing with exactly the same symptoms. Strangely enough after having correctly identified the available Update 1 and downloading it the update installer aborted with an error from the 16-bit MS-DOS subsystem (huh?) and then hung itself. After I terminated it any attempt to check for updates always resulted in the message that no updates were available. Running the downloadable Update 1 installer from the registered users page however worked flawlessly again.

I don’t remember having had any such problems when I installed the trial version a month ago – well, except that I couldn’t install the Update 1 – but I think that was by design as it only appears to be available to registered users.