Starting Opera causes excessive MsiInstaller logging to EventLog

[xyzzy-opera]

xyzzy-opera last edited by

I noticed that whenever I start Opera, it causes the Windows Management Instrumentation to enumerate all software installed via MSI. This in turn produces one Event Log (Application) entry per installed piece of software.
On my computer this is ~500 log entries - which is unacceptable.
This appears to have started about a week ago.

I'm almost certain that this has something to do with the Win32_Product WMI object, some information is available at:
How to NOT Use Win32_Product in Group Policy Filtering

Opera Version:

• 89.0.4447.38

Windows 10 Home version:

• Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.19043.1645]

Sample Event Log screenshot:

[xyzzy-opera]

xyzzy-opera @xyzzy-opera last edited by

@xyzzy-opera
Additional information

To be more precise, I suspect that Opera's opera_autoupdate.exe ends up running a WMI query which causes the behaviour described above.

A quote from the article I linked to above:

Don’t use Win32_Product

The Win32_Product WMI class is part of the CIMV2 namespace and implements the MSI provider (msiprov.dll and associated msi.mof) to list and validate installed installation packages. You will see MsiInstaller event 1035 in the Application log for each application queried by the class:*

[bazzaman]

bazzaman @xyzzy-opera last edited by

@xyzzy-opera

I logged an Opera bug report for this yesterday and I have been notified that it has been moved to the developers team.

This issue seems to have come about with the update to 89.0.4447.38. I now have this happening on 3 PCs.

[bazzaman]

bazzaman @xyzzy-opera last edited by

@xyzzy-opera

You may be right, but this is happening every time Opera is launched. One has to wonder why why would Opera need to check for installed software on every launch?

[xyzzy-opera]

xyzzy-opera @bazzaman last edited by

@bazzaman
Hi there,

Thank you very much for the information!

I'd imagine that they'll weed this one out - all in all, it's a quite nasty feature, after all.

[xyzzy-opera]

xyzzy-opera @bazzaman last edited by

@bazzaman said in Starting Opera causes excessive MsiInstaller logging to EventLog:

@xyzzy-opera

You may be right, but this is happening every time Opera is launched. One has to wonder why why would Opera need to check for installed software on every launch?

A good question.

FWIW, the culprit is not opera_autoupdate.exe. I replaced it with a dummy executable and the behaviour remained the same.

[xyzzy-opera]

xyzzy-opera last edited by

It appears that this has now been fixed in version 89.0.4447.48

Sweet.