[Mr Thwibble]

'lo

A couple of weeks ago I came up with the stellar idea of installing Westwood's original (W95/98) Red Alert on my W2K machine with the MS ACT tool and the compatibility tool that's on the W2K install disk. I fully admit that this was a dumb thing to do, so file this under 'seemed like a good idea at the time'. The install went OK, and the game runs great. I was keen to cane my friends 7-year old son, what can I say?

However since then, whenever I try to run certain installers built with what I suspect is a specific version of Install-Shield I get two error messages:

MSVCRT.DLL is not a valid W32s application, and setup.exe application failed to start error 0xc0000142 - and then the installer usually stops, but on rare occasions certain installers will continue.

.msi fils generally install without a problem, but only if I launch the .msi directly, and not via any accompanying setup.exe. The PC is virus/spyware free and in otherwise excellent health. W2K, 3.0ghz, 2gb, 60gb, fully patched.

The following I have tried, and completed successfully, but didn't cure the problem:

(+) reinstalling IE6
(+) reinstalling SP4
(+) reinstalling Office 2003 (.msi ran, but not the setup.exe)
(+) installing MDAC (8, I think it was)
(+) installing DirectX 9c (was getting desparate at this point!)
(+) copying MSVCRT.DLL from a 'known good' w2k environment
(+) reinstallation of VB5 and C++ runtimes
(+) reinstalling w2k original fileset from CD using recover mode (not processing registry)
(+) a mirriad of registry tools, which didn't find any problems (and so didn't fix/modify anything)
(+) removing msvcrt.dll from non \winnt\system32 directories
(+) unregistering of the slayerui.dll that I registered to enable compatibility mode
(+) reregistering of msvcrt.dll

I tried reinstallation of NAV 2003, but the setup.exe refused to execute.

I've tried just about everything I can think of - if anyone has further suggestions, I'd love to hear them. Rebuilding this computer is not really an option because it would take far, far to long... THX, TIA!

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Did u get the latest Windows Update for Windows Installer 3.1 (i.e. *.msi files)?

[darth_ash]

Did u get the latest Windows Update for Windows Installer 3.1 (i.e. *.msi files)?

[Mr Thwibble]

Yes - forgot to put that in. I also downloaded the .msi cleanup util from MS, but didn't want to use that because it didn't list anything that I could say for certain was causing me problems.

Did u get the latest Windows Update for Windows Installer 3.1 (i.e. *.msi files)?

[darth_ash]

Windows Installer CleanUp Utility removes only the Windows Installer configuration information that is related to those programs.
I asked whether U got the latest version of Windows Installer, i.e. 3.1.

[Mr Thwibble]

Yes, I do.

Windows Installer CleanUp Utility removes only the Windows Installer configuration information that is related to those programs.
I asked whether U got the latest version of Windows Installer, i.e. 3.1.

[darth_ash]

Yes - forgot to put that in.  I also downloaded the .msi cleanup util from MS, but didn't want to use that because it didn't list anything that I could say for certain was causing me problems.

Try using the cleanup, might solve the issue.

[Mr Thwibble]

Try using the cleanup, might solve the issue.

...any thoughts as to where to start, since all the apps in the list are installed, work fine and don't cause me any grief?

From what I remember, the cleanup util requires you to select one and then have at it with a big stick. Might be mistaken though, I didn't go any further than installing the clean-up util and thinking that it might be headed the wrong way.

[darth_ash]

Refer this MS article.
http://support.micro...kb;en-us;290301.

Note: After u run the CleanUp, U will have to re-install all Applications that were installed using Windows Installer.

Edited by darth_ash, 26 July 2005 - 01:54 PM.

[Mr Thwibble]

Refer this MS article.
http://support.micro...kb;en-us;290301.

Note: After u run the CleanUp, U will have to re-install all Applications that were installed using Windows Installer.

Hmmmm, I'll re-open that line of enquiry, but because the app (Red Alert) was not listed I was reluctant to dive in and start tweaking stuff.

Any other thoughts?

[Mr Thwibble]

Hmmmm, I'll re-open that line of enquiry, but because the app (Red Alert) was not listed I was reluctant to dive in and start tweaking stuff.

Any other thoughts?

No dice. Didn't work.

I also tried re-registering a whole load of DLL's associated with IE6 manually.