'%ProgramFiles%' returned empty string

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I am receiving this error message when I try to install Visual Basic 6 runtimes

winetricks vb6run 
------------------------------------------------------ 
wine cmd.exe /c echo '%ProgramFiles%' returned empty string


I am using Wine 1.3.35 on a MacProBook 2 Ghz Intel Core i7 running OSX 10.7.2 
(Lion)
WINETRICKS_VERSION=20111115

Original issue reported on code.google.com by DadsAn...@gmail.com on 14 Jan 2012 at 6:59

[GNUGradyn]

Still getting this on ubuntu 16.10

[austin987]

Please open a new issue, and include the complete terminal output, preferably as an attachment. Also include wine/winetricks version.

[tomasjura]

WINE=wine-development winetricks vb6run did the trick. The problem is when WINEPREFIX is installed with one wine version (wine-development) using winecfg and another wine version (stable) under winetricks tries to get a variable.

[austin987]

Are you trying to use two wine versions on the same prefix at the same time?

[tomasjura]

Not the same time in the sense: two different wine server runs above one WINEPREFIX in one moment. The exact scenario is: 1) use wine-unstable in winecfg to initialize WINEPREFIX and terminate it and then 2) run wine (stable) with winetricks. The exact versions used in experiment were unstable: 2.12 and stable 1.8.7.

[austin987]

If wineserver hadn't terminated from the first command, the second would fail, and that's expected (user error).

Wine/winetricks don't care if you switch versions that a prefix uses, as long as its not running at the same time.

[jre-wine]

If wineserver hadn't terminated from the first command, the second would fail, and that's expected (user error).

The Debian packaging only detects different wineserver (SERVER_PROTOCOL_VERSION) again since wine 1.8.5-1 and wine-development 1.9.19-1.

[austin987]

@jre-wine, I'm not sure what you're getting at, could you explain? 1.8.5 and 1.9.19 have different protocol versions:
@@ -6153,6 +6365,6 @@
struct terminate_job_reply terminate_job_reply;
};

-#define SERVER_PROTOCOL_VERSION 490
+#define SERVER_PROTOCOL_VERSION 517

#endif /* __WINE_WINE_SERVER_PROTOCOL_H */

so if wineserver from the original command was still running, that could be why it fails.

I think it's worth see if wineserver is active, i.e., trying:
$ WINE=wine-unstable wineboot && wineserver -w && WINE=stable winetricks win7

and see if that has the problem

[jre-wine]

@austin987 The Debian packaging had been broken for some time until this was fixed in the mentioned versions (SERVER_PROTOCOL_VERSION was always 0 in the broken packages). But after rereading the latest comments by @tomasjura the used versions should have been fixed ones, and the behavior should have been as you describe.

I guess I got confused a bit by the long buglog, and the mention of wine-unstable: wine-unstable has been replaced in Debian by wine-development several years ago. I guess that was a typo by @tomasjura since he used wine-development in his previous post.