That NSIS and PowerShell script in the Install Script Generator Folder saved my @$$ more times than I care to mention.
What you fellas need to realize is that Mids never really intended to have the project touched by anyone else's hands. (No joint development).
One of the major fallacies in that logic is that all the paths are absolute to his environment.
You need to go through all the directory declarations in the shell script (CMD) and change them to the relative path.
For instance:
rd /S /Q ".\Finalized\App Folder\Data\" > Result.txt
Notice, shell needs ".\" to use a folder within it's own directory and "..\" is a singular back-step to the parent.
Same thing applies for the NSIS part 1, 2 & 3; make sure they all have relative paths. Use absolute paths AS LITTLE as possible, or if you can completely avoid it that would be awesome.
!define MUI_FINISHPAGE_RUN "$INSTDIR\MHDLoader.exe"
Mids' Debug Configuration is also a little messy, it's designed to not change the working directory so it has constant access to the dependent files; if you can re-work the dependencies you might make it easier on yourselves for a development team.
Also keep in mind that the resources that Mids' usually depends on for an easier update are getting to the point where they're more likely to break the database housing all the numbers than aid it. A lot of the handlers were hard-coded; such as the columns and row count to cursor through the resources; A small look into that might set a lot of things right; I never had the time to tear it apart... I luckily just had St0n3y around to figure out work-a-rounds, lol.
ALSO keep in mind when making big time database edits that the config.mhd file MIGHT require to be included in the next update.
Commenting out the
del /Q ".\Finalized\App Folder\Data\config.mhd" >> Result.txt
line will do the trick. however the user's settings will be forfeited and overwritten on the next install. But including that will almost guarantee a successful update.
Hope some of this has given some light into the issues that seem to keep arising. Mids' source code is just one of those "Fix one thing; break 3 other things" sorta code. Mids' himself expressly apologized for it's "organic" structure. Looking back on the code he; he even stated that he wouldn't have done half of what's in there without twitching, lol.
ALSO: The auto-updater was disabled long before Mids handed over the source to Titan. It was mostly due to the UAC. It wouldn't work correctly, because if you aren't a full-blown admin (not just part of the administrator group) on Vista and Win7 than you need a full-trust certificate to make changes to files in the C:\Program Files\ directory. See... if people just installed it to their AppData folder(s) it wouldn't be an issue. In my opinion that's where it should be installed at all the time; just to avoid the UAC issues. However I'm sure while some users will be ecstatic at the new found stability of Mids, the power users will piss and moan about the convoluted/natively hidden location... lol.