windows installer

s-cogan

sorry i didnt know where else to put this



every few minutes(it varies), a box appears on my screen, overrides anythuing i am doing, ie prevents my typing and all, gets in the way and annoys me.
its called windows installer, and has the message "...preparing to install" in it.
only option is the cancel button, but hitting this means i cant maximise the screen im working on so i can work away while its cancelling.
mostly i leave it, and work away on my own screen is maximised and it goes away. and then comes back in 2-5 minutes and off we go again.



any help regarding how to get rid of it is greatly appreciated.

JonathanAnon

Sounds like something did not install fully or properly. Did you install any application lately that had issues? Usually the way of fixing things like this is to either i) reinstall the software completely or ii) if you dont need it, remove the software completely... but the first thing you need to do is to identify which application is causing the error dialog box.

s-cogan

can you help me identify it??
thanks

JonathanAnon

This might be difficult. It is likely that if I was sitting in front of the PC I might be able to identify the process by hitting CTRL-ALT-DELETE and looking at the running processes. If you could take an image of the dialog box that appears and post it here it might help.. can you do this?

Codpeas

Turning on Windows Installer verbose logging should help here. See:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223300

This way you can peruse the logs at your leisure or post them here for the rest of us to look at.

s-cogan

JonathanAnon wrote: »

This might be difficult. It is likely that if I was sitting in front of the PC I might be able to identify the process by hitting CTRL-ALT-DELETE and looking at the running processes. If you could take an image of the dialog box that appears and post it here it might help.. can you do this?

not really.

if i hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE, could i do what you said??

Sconsey

The task manager will show you that msiexec.exe is running but that in itself won't help you find the application/service that is triggering the repair. As mentioned earlier, if you turn on verbose logging and then when the windows installer dialog box appears check the log folder, the newest log file will be for the current msiexec operation. Copy and paste the first few lines of the log file on here...

Alternatively, all windows installer operations are also logged in the event viewer, if you check event viewer and select the most recent msiexec.exe entry (under the 'system' tab I think) , copy and paste the text for that event into a post here.
The event viewer will only identify the GUID of the component that triggered the repair action but you might be able to work back from that by searching for that GUID in the registry.

The reason you are constantly getting the dialog box is because something failed to install properly, in your case I would say it's a driver of some sort and everytime Windows tries to use that driver it is triggering a repair of the broken install. Printer drivers are a common culprit.

Hope this helps...post logs....

s-cogan

thanks for all the help lads, but verbose logging could not be installed because of something to do with windows installer not being installed properly. where can i find the event manager??