MSI

This is a quick post on how to troubleshoot situations where you get error 2503 (Called RunScript when not marked in progress) followed by error 2502 (Called InstallFinalize when no install in progress) when trying to install or uninstall software with Windows Installer.

Creating an installer that does not suck is hard. The tools available are expensive, inadequate, overly complicated and/or poorly documented (pick any combination). WiX is one of the better choices. It is free and it is used for some Microsoft products. But WiX is just a wrapper around MSI and as such is unnecessarily difficult to use. In an effort to make life better for fellow developers I am publishing the full source code of uberAgent’s installer here.

I was given the Aventail VPN client software to install on a customer’s Windows 7 x64 computer. That failed miserably. Here is what I did to find the root cause of the problem.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. One of the constants in the Windows universe is the knowledge that user profiles increase in size over time. They tend to accumulate all kinds of junk and become bloated which is especially cumbersome in the case of roaming profiles because all that “weight” is copied across the network time and again, slowing down the logon process.