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How to find locked binaries as part of upgrade/fresh installation?

How to find locked binaries as part of upgrade/fresh installation?
When you upgrade an application using windows installer many a time you might have come across issues like the files which you wanted to overwrite or delete is already in use or in another way some other application is already using that binary. In such cases, the windows installer will show a FilesInUse dialog. However, the problem here is this dialog will show only the application name which is consuming the binary and not the actual binary name. This has 2 problems, in case of a simple application which a handful of binaries we can easily figure out the binary getting locked, however in case of a large application with several binaries and run times it might be tricky to find out such locked binaries. The problem gets even more complicated if this scenario occurs in an environment where you don't have access, for example, a customer environment.

Let me briefly explain how installer identifies and shows the application which is consuming our binaries. As part of the install costing process, installer identifies the files which are in use and it populates an internal "FilesInUse" table. As part of the InstallValidate custom action, this table will be queried and the information will be shown in msiRMFileInUse dialog. I have done a lot of google search and I couldn't find a way to extract the file in use information from "FilesInUse" table. Having said that, you can use the below tools to find this,

  1. To check which application is consuming your dll, you can use the Sysinternals utility "Listdlls" and here is the command listdlls -r -d <dll name>
  2. You can run the utility without any parameters and it will dump all the application and its loaded dlls

Sometimes listdlls utility will not find the locked dlls and in that case you can use handle.exe which is another sysinternal utility to find out if somebody has a handle to that binary/file

For example
     handle.exe <full path to the binary>

If both the above fails, another option is to use procmon utility to find out what is happening with the installer and this can give you some clue. As you can see in the below screenshot, the installer is trying to write something to the highlighted registry key (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\RestartManager\Session0000\RegFiles0000) and this key contains the value to locked binaries. Note that the key will be available as long as the FileInUse dialog is active and once you cancel the dialog the registry value will get cleaned up



In summary, based on your situation, you can use one of the above-mentioned tools or registry key to find out locked binaries
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