Windows Installer

[punkygoat.livejournal.com]

Anyone here know how to reinstall Windows Installer on XP? It could help some of my customer with burning problems, as many issues are our burn engine not being able to be installed properly.

The instructions we have are as such:
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1. At the command prompt, type one of the following commands, and then press ENTER, where drive and Windows are the drive and folder where Windows is installed.

If you are running Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows 2000, or Microsoft Windows NT, type the following:

attrib -r -s -h drive:\Windows\System32\dllcache

2. At the command prompt, type the following. Press ENTER after you type each line.

ren msi.dll msi.old
ren msiexec.exe msiexec.old
ren msihnd.dll msihnd.old

3. At the command prompt, type exit, and then press ENTER.

4. Restart your computer.

5. Update the Windows Installer files to the latest version. To do so, visit one of the following Microsoft Web sites, and then download and install Windows Installer 2.0.

Note Windows Installer 2.0 is included with Microsoft Windows XP. You do not have to perform this step if you are using Windows XP.


· For Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 and Microsoft Windows 2000:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/release.asp?releaseid=32832&NewList=1

6. After the installation of the Windows Installer is complete, shut down and restart your computer
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Now, I tried this on my machine and the first problem that came up with that those three files I need to rename are not in system32/dllcache, but only /system32/. So I renamed the files in that directory and restarted. Upon restart, I went to system32 and found the old and new versions of those files, so they must reinstate on restart. But I also found the new versions in system32/dllcache.
Then I went to another machine that this fix had not been done on and found the first file, msi.dll, in the dllcache, along with all three system32.

Can anyone shed a bit more light on this? Seems like renaming the files in system32 and rebooting should work, but just want to double check.

Comments

[torkell]

dllcache is a backup of a bunch of system files. Anything which has a twin in dllcache will be replaced by a copy of that twin should the file go missing or be mangled in some way (e.g. overwritten with older version). To get round this, delete the dllcache one first. You don't need to remove the r/h/s attributes to do this - you can use explorer and tell it to "show hidden files" and "show protected system files".

You may soon (~5 min) see a prompt telling you the files are missing and to feed it the windows cd so it can copy them. If you do, then just cancel the prompt. I don't know if windows will skip the prompt if the files are on the disk (i.e. you installed windows from the hard disk, and left the source files) - it might do. The same might happen with a service pack.

Another thing you could try is disabling the system file checker - the settings are somewhere in the group policy. If this is a local machine and not part of a domain, run gpedit.msc to get at the local group policy.

[punkygoat.livejournal.com]

The command line instructions are probably just because they're meant to be done by a customer via email or something. Much easier to have them do everything from there then having them follow a bunch of different mouse clicks without someone right there.

Also, do you happen to know for a fact if XP loads those DLLs back from cabs or anything?

[torkell]

I know that Win2k will prompt for a CD. I don't know about WinXP - haven't had to do any mucking around with dllcache on the WinXP box yet. I'd guess it'll try to load them back from cabs if they're on the disk.

(in my case it was reinstalling HTML help, which Microsoft say can't be done under Win2k)