Windows Installer won't let me install anything ?

Question

Trying to install a Silverlight Update, a Java update or other software, I get this window:

What could be the problem?

Answer 1

A few things you should take a look at.

1. Make sure you have full administrative priviledges on the computer, and make sure you start the installer as administrator. (To make sure, right-click on the icon, and choose "Run as Administrator.")

2. Make sure you download and run the installer for YOUR user folder or from a network share that you have full administrative rights to.

3. If none of this works, go to your start menu and type in: "Disk Cleanup" start the program and select the "Temporary Files" checkbox and start the process. This may help to delete some failed install that you have living on your system and causing the error.

Good luck!

Answer 2

Try repairing your file and registry permissions with SubACL.

Answer 3

We had a strange one like this were the user had put a file into C:\Users which had the same name as their profile. That is the folder C:\Users\USERNAME contained their profile but they had a text document called USERNAME (no extension) also in C:\Users.

Answer 4

If you run sysinternals process explorer, you might be able to see the MS installer process msiexec.exe running. I killed off this process, an then re-attempted the silverlight install and it seemed to install OK.

I can't guarantee that this is the best way to do this though...

Answer 5

Try and restart Windows Installer using the following commands in an elevated command prompt.

net stop msiserver

then

net start msiserver