We met a very strange problem when we had to re-install a third party Joomla component. We will not go into the details of why we had to do a fresh re-install, sufficient to say it was to try and fix an ‘opportunity for improvement’. We couldn’t uninstall using the standard Joomla mechanism because we wanted to retain all the underlying database tables used by the component so did a manual uninstall instead.
The component was quite large but we extracted all the files and placed them in the tmp directory, so it was easy to reinstall until we determined the cause of the problem. [We encountered a few MySQL Error 2006 – DB Server has gone away’ messages, but apart from being annoying were not really causing a problem.]
The component ‘spun’ its icon and then presented us with the following messages:
"Component Install: DB function reports no errors"
"Error installing component"
In addition an entry was make in the #__extensions table but no files are ever installed. It is impossible to remove it via the Joomla ‘Manage’ feature and all one can do is remove the entries from the table via phpadmin (or similar).
Attempts to re-install again, are repeatable and every time a new entry was inserted into #__extensions. If one tried several times, several rows were created.
Then we found this problem report, which had all the symptoms we were seeing. It was raised against Joomla 1.6 but was still very useful. The clue was the mention of the #__assets table and sure enough we found a single line entry in the #__assets table which we could then remove and the next attempt to reinstall worked perfectly.