Installation woes in CosmosWorks

[PDMAdmin]

I am encountering a strange installation error with CosmosWorks 2004, which I downloaded from the SolidWorks website. I double-click on the "cwsetup.exe" file, and about two or three seconds later, a dialog box comes up saying "The wizard was interrupted." Of course, nothing ever gets installed, since it all happens so quickly. I have tried installing the program on a different computer, and it works fine. Ordinarily, I would just use the computer that works, but we have several CosmosWorks options that will need to be installed on people's local machines, and I want to have a handle on this error so it doesn't turn into a show-stopper. Has anyone come across this before?

FYI, I have tried the following: Removing and reinstalling Windows Installer, installing MDAC, modifying DCOM security permissions, installing the program from CD instead of a local hard drive, and using "msiexec" instead of clicking on the icon directly. None of those actions has fixed the problem.

Thanks for the help.

 

[Glonoin]

Log into the machine as a user with local system admin rights.
Disable your anti-virus software.
Insure you have enough drive space to install it (minimum of twice as much as the program will eventually use is a pretty good rule of thumb.)
Then attempt to install it.

That the issue is machine specific (meaning the install works fine on another computer) isolates it to something unique to that machine. If it was still giving you problems on that specific machine after a complete reinstall of the OS and applications from the ground up, I would be pretty bewildered.

 

[PDMAdmin]

Okay, after much weeping and gnashing of teeth, I have finally isolated the cause of the problem. There was one file missing from my WINNT\System32 directory: STDOLE32.TLB. I was able to pinpoint the absence of this particular file through the "filemon" utility. What a pain... What makes me really upset is that I re-installed Windows Installer and InstallShield, and that particular file didn't come along for the ride with either installation. And all these years, I always thought the purpose of installers was to put all the necessary files and registry settings where they needed to be for the programs to work properly. Silly me...

Oh, well. Live and learn... I hope this helps someone who gets into a similar predicament. Score another one for Microsoft's cryptic error messages.