Windows Installer: Users are Prompted for Original Installation Media after Receiving a Prism Package

Summary:

After installing a Prism package of an application that was based on an MSI file, the Windows Installer prompts end users for the original installation media when they try to launch the application.

Cause:

The problem arises because of changes Microsoft made to registry entries between version 1.1 and version 2 of the Windows Installer. Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 and Windows XP use version 2 of the Installer; earlier versions of Windows operating systems use version 1.1. This issue is explained in detail in the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q326204&. As noted in the article, Microsoft has released a migration tool called msiregmv.exe that corrects the problem.

Solution:

You need to run msiregmv.exe on target systems that are experiencing the prompting problem because they have a different version of the Installer than the system on which the Package was built. You can run msiregmv.exe by setting up a Prism Deploy command task and assigning it to computers that are experiencing the problem. Alternately, you can write a Prism script that will first install the package, and then run the msiregmv utility. The script can be deployed through Prism Deploy via a script task. Here’s a sample script:

/InstallPackage \\servername\sharename\package.pwc

/Run %comspec% /c msiregmv.exe

You could also run the executable in a login script.

To prevent the problem from occurring with future packages, you should:

1. create all of your packages on a system that is already running version 2 of the Installer, and
2. update all of your target systems to version 2 of the Installer

Msiregmv.exe should already reside on computers running W2K SP3. Look in either of these two locations:

• %windir%\servicepackfiles\i386\msiregmv.exe
• %windir%\system32\msiregmv.exe
• download msiregmv.exe