RSS-Spider

Was having problems installing a very critical piece of software on my new laptop this past weekend. Every time that the installer would get to “Publishing Product Information” the install would fail and start a rollback. Googled the problem a couple times but couldn’t find anything usable. Couple items said to run CMD as the admin then launch the MSI file using “msiexec.exe /i program.msi” and this should fix any problems that might exist with permissions. Well no this didn’t work. Looking at the directions for msiexec.exe I created a log file by rerunning msiexec.exe with the following command..

msiexec.exe /i program.msi /lv* installlog.log

looking in this file once the installer AGAIN FAILED… I found

MSI (c) (24:5C) [17:14:38:971]: Machine policy value ‘DisableRollback’ is 0

DisableRollBack set to 0 (zero)? Ok… so lets set it to one so it won’t roll back and see what happens.

Googled again for how to do this and found this page http://krzanowski.com/zune.html where someone was complaining that they couldn’t install their Zune software… Interesting… I’m sure they’re on a windows box using the MSI installer for a Zune… so three Microsoft products and this guy was having trouble installing… ha…

The key bits on this page are below… but first let me stress that this worked for me… it might not work for you. When ever you edit your registry all sorts of bad things can go wrong including a totally loss of your computer. I do not recommend you try this unless you’re totally sure you know what you’re doing. I will not be held responsible for anyone screwing up their computer. This information is for informational & educational use only. Blah blah blah… Anyhow..

- close all windows.

- click start – run – regedit (for safety if you want , right click on Computer and choose export. save it as a backup)

- expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\ (In my case there was no Installer Directory listed under here) I’ve got a brand new laptop and this was my case too.

-With “Windows” highlighted on left, right-click on Windows and click on New and then Key.

-Type Installer

-Then click on Installer and on the right you should see a key “Default – REG_SZ – (value not set)”.

-Right-click on an empty area below this and choose New and then DWORD.

-Type DisableRollback (one word and it is case-sensitive)

-After that, right-click on DisableRollback and choose Modify.

-Change the numeric value data from 0 to a 1 and to the right, Hexadecimal should have a dot next to it.

- Close regedit

- rerun the install program…

This time my application installed WITHOUT A PROBLEM.

Never did figure out why it didn’t install originally or what the problem was. Such is Vista…