installer problem? (not sure)

[booster94]

I'm not really sure what this problem is but it has occured on 3 of my servers and they all exhibit the same symptoms.

1. The Windows Update link from the start menu does not work. Looking at the processes the Windows Update shortcut does lanch IE, but it never actually opens a window.

2. If you open a browser and manually go to the Windows Update page I can get all the way to the point where updates are about to be downloaded, the progress bar comes up but no progress is ever made...it just hangs indefinetely. Updates can be installed manually (not using WU)

3. The Search shortcut from the start menu doesn't work (nothing happens), but the search button inside of a folder view works fine.

4. The last thing has only been noticed on one server and has not been tried on the others. This server was having a problem with McAfee VShield so it was un-installed and when I tried to reinstall McAfee said it could not install the product because it did not detect a Server OS. Mcafee gave us a work-around that forced it to perform the install as if it did detect a server OS (command line switch for the MSI). This worked but now I'm having problems installing other things such as the Veritas remote agent on all of the servers having this problem, while this software worked fine on other computers without this problem.

I'm not sure where the problem could lie, or even where to start looking. Has anyone seen this, or have any thoughts?

Dan

 

[dmandell]

This may or may not help, but the Microsoft support site has several articles with solutions to Windowsupdate issues.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;EN-US;KBHOWTO

Dana

 

[booster94]

I've tried just about everything to do with Windows Updates including uninstalling the client portion off the servers and letting it reinstall. I'm fairly certain the problem lies elsewhere, especially with the problems I have loading other apps.

Dan

 

[dmandell]

Could it be related to MS installer? both those apps and windows update use MS installer. Have you tried manually replacing the MS installer files with new, (know good) versions? (off of a working server)

Also I saw a similar problem once where Java was broken.
Hopefully nobody deleted the java files off of your servers as part of that virus hoax that has been going around.

Dana

 

[booster94]

Well I have tried downloading Installer 2.0 and re-installing it with no luck. I have also run installer cleanup utility with no luck.

I just copied the files over from a known goos server and that didn't work, but it was unable to copy msi.dll over because it said it was in use. Is that right? Should that file be in use?

Dan

 

[dmandell]

I think so. You may have to boot to command mode to copy the file.

 

[CyberScream]

I have the same problem and have been looking for ages for a solution - I dont really want to rebuild the server as it is the first root DC on the network. Any one have any sucess with this issue??

E

 

[nhidalgo]

did you ever get this issue resolved. I have a similar issue. I think i found the problem but not sure how to fix it. In the Dcom config utility(dcomcnfg.exe) remoteinstaller is missing. I not sure how to get this back in.

Nick