The installation of a plugin to the Common Application Folder is done with administrative rights.  This means that the unpacking must be done also with administrative rights.  By default, this involves launching Studio at least once after a plugin (or an update to a plugin) is installed in order to do the unpacking with Studio.

In general it is not a good idea to launch a UI application with administrative rights obtained via elevation for various reasons, in particular if the user does not close it immediately and starts working with it, changing settings, etc.

Is there any way to force the unpacking by Studio of a plugin via a call with no UI involved?

If there is no way to silently unpack a plugin, is there any potential issue with Studio if the unpacking is done manually by the installer by extracting the files in the plugin package and overwriting the existing ones?

Josep.