April 13th 2009 01:28 pm
Google Earth “offline installer”
Google seem to be of the incorrect opion that you want your machine infected with Google Update.
The Google Earth download is actually just a cunningly disguised Google Update installer, and it seems to think it needs elevation.
It extracts %TEMP%\GUXXXXX.tmp\GoogleUpdate.exe, then tries to run:
GoogleUpdate.exe /install "appguid={74AF07D8-FB8F-4d51-8AC7-927721D56EBB}&appname=Google%20Earth&needsadmin=true" /installelevated
Instead of this,
GoogleUpdate.exe /install "appguid={74AF07D8-FB8F-4d51-8AC7-927721D56EBB}&appname=Google%20Earth"
..will happily download and extract Google Earth to %TEMP%\7ZipSfx.XXX. This is the unpacked offline installer, but the installer itself still attempts to elevate. Luckily, it’s already unpacked, in:
%TEMP%\7ZipSfx.XXX\program files\Google\Google Earth
Just copy this folder to somewhere convenient and run googleearth.exe.
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For reference for other apps, the quoted argument to GoogleUpdate.exe is the last “line” in the downloaded GoogleEarthSetup.exe.
1 Comment »
mullet on 13 Apr 2009 at 2:26 pm #
Perhaps they just don’t want customer support queries asking about old bugs that they’ve fixed in an updated release. Forcing people to update to the latest version might reduce this issue. Perhaps this isn’t what you want, but if you are choosing to loose your software liberties you will inevitably be restrained with what the vendor wants to let you do as a result.