AIR 4.0 captive runtime won't run: "requires a version of Adobe AIR" alert

[stolennickname]

I'm creating an AIR captive runtime application, and it won't run on a target Windows* machine. It displays the following alert instead:

This application requires a version of Adobe AIR which cannot be found. Please download the latest version of this runtime from http://www.adobe.com/go/getair, or contact the application author for an updated version.

How can I package the captive runtime differently so it won't display this message? The application is a pure ActionScript app compiled with the adt binary from the standalone SDK (this is not Flex).

In addition, I'm disturbed that a captive runtime AIR application pings Adobe in any way. I am seeing occasional pings to an adobe site upon launch of the app (something like airdownload2.adobe.com, if I remember correctly). No I'm not using any service calls in my app at this point in development, it's very simple, and should not be pinging the net at all. Why is this happening? I need to disable this too.

* Problem occurring only on a particular Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit machine. Unfortunately, this is the end client's machine so I can't tinker with it.

[Oldes]

What are you using as a target? is it "bundle"? I was just now packing windows bundle with AIR4.0 and it seems to work without any AIR runtime installed. At least on my Windows 7.

[stolennickname]

Target is bundle.

I'm following the packaging instructions from http://help.adobe.com/en_US/air/build/WSfffb011ac560372f709e16db131e43659b9-8000.html

The resulting app runs with no problems on one Windows 7 machine, but gives the error on another Windows 7 machine.

[stolennickname]

I've created an updated captive runtime bundle for Windows using the latest AIR 4.0.0.1090 beta SDK, and it is still failing to run on one machine. I am still clueless about how to avoid this error.

[Oldes]

Do you have access to the problematic machine? If so, maybe you could try to install Sysinternal's Process Monitor http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645

Run the tool, create filter to see just events containing your app name and try to find in the result any issue... you could also compare the log with same log from not problematic machine or with app made with older SDK which was working.

That's all what I can do... it's a shame that nobody from Adobe is interested yet... maybe you could also submit a bug.

[stolennickname · Accepted solution]

SOLVED

It turns out to be a case of user error.

The client, on the problem machine, was peeking into the zip package using some proprietary zip utility they had configured on their machine and double-clicking the exe there instead of unzipping the package and running the exe from explorer. The error message is misleading.

Obviously this issue will be avoided for the release version after an installer is built.