App Store: Applications shown as installed when they're not

Just a heads up since I ran into this yesterday and took me a few minutes to figure it out.

Did you do a clean install? Still have one of your backup or Time Machine drives attached?

Spotlight is indexing your external drives. Try disconnecting all your external drives. I actually went into Spotlight preferences and added all my external and network drives/computers to the exception list.

The App Store via spotlight was finding apps installed on both my Snow Leopard and Lion backups and not allowing me to download them on my clean install until they were removed from Spotlight.

I ran into the same thing when I purchased the new iMac. Never suspected it was Spotlight though. Thanks.

I also had another weird problem with the App store apps that I already had paid for and using on the MacBook. The App store kept telling me that I had to use the original account to update the apps on the iMac. (I had migrated everything over using Time Machine) I wound up having to uninstall those apps first. The the App store allowed me to download them again and subsequently update.

This by the way, occurred even though I was using the same account to log into the App store on both machines. Confusing.... ?

chscag said:

The App store kept telling me that I had to use the original account to update the apps on the iMac. (I had migrated everything over using Time Machine) I wound up having to uninstall those apps first. The the App store allowed me to download them again and subsequently update.

Click to expand...

I noticed that too and I only have one Mac. I was yelling: "This is the same account I purchased the app with!!"
I didn't know what caused it but just like you, finally uninstalling and reinstalling solved it.

BIG "thank you"!

bobtomay, I created an account just to say thank you - thank you, thank you, thank you!

I got my new iMac yesterday and all my Appstore-Apps showed as installed - it was driving me crazy. And not once did I even think about the drives I had attached, which, of course, contain my old TimeMachine-Backups....

So you just saved my sanity, thanks a million times ))))