WiX installer: Burn shows a GUID as progress text

Question

I have a WiX Burn bundle that includes five MSI packages. During an installation - when upgrading a bundle - I see this:

This happens after progressing the MSI packages. I am not sure what happens. Can this be shown as a text string?

Answer 1

After installing new version of the package Burn runs cached previous version of bundle with command uninstall and Display property set to embedded. Bundle has an unique ID which cannot be set in .wxs file but assigned in compile time. To fix this in my bootstrapper I filter progress messages and replace GUIDs with user friendly text.

Answer 2

In my case, that strange GUID was actually a zombie MSI package that was left behind during one of my previous installation/uninstallation tests (because it was failing during the uninstall operation). Somehow the Burn engine was detecting that package as related to the actual installation, and it was trying to install/uninstall it.

If that's your case, you should see that zombie package in the Burn generated logs, and you will be able to remove it from your MSI database using the Microsoft Fixit tool.