installer hanging

[mayesey]

Hi,
Ive had my PC about half a year and it has windows xp pro on it. Since ive had it the installing has never worked quite right. When installing games or programs it gets to the installation screen and then pauses. i check task manager and it says its working but in the process list it is working at 00 (so it aint doing anything). after about 15-30 minutes (changes) it starts to install properly and it works fine again. I have this same problem with windows update, except usually it takes a lot longer.

does anyone else have this problem or have any ideas about how to fix it? if i need to give you more information about my system then just say, i didnt have enough time to type a lot in this post.

Thanks in advance for your replies, and i hope someone has a cure

 

[mayesey]

forgot to mention it does the same thing for uninstalling programs etc aswell. it makes a simple, quick task a very long task that stops me doing other things.

 

[Goalie]

If you have a virus scanner installed, occasionally the programs will have to wait while the OS requests a file scan. However, I've usually seen that take 5 seconds, not 15 minutes.

You might try disabling your scanner temporarily, if you do.

Another thing to try is reinstalling the MSI installation engine. You can download that from Microsoft here:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;292539

The problem you mention with Windows Update makes me think this is a MSI problem... Windows Update (unsurprisingly) uses that to install the files on your system.

Hope this helps.

 

[mayesey]

hey thanks a lot for the reply, i dont think it is the virus scanner, but ill try disabling next time. ill try downloading that MSI thing aswell. ill reply when i see if it has worked or not.

Thanks a lot

 

[mayesey]

i went to that link and i couldnt find the download for windows XP on there. is there any other sites where i could get this?

 

[Goalie]

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...FamilyID=4B6140F9-2D36-4977-8FA1-6F8A0F5DCA8F

The page doesn't say anything about XP. However the links that took me to that page indicate it was for XP.

Leave it up to Microsoft to make this confusing.

 

[mayesey]

ok ill try downloading that then. fingers crossed it works.

 

[mayesey]

when trying to install i get the error "wrong os or os version for this operation" im guessing this means it isnt compatible with XP.
any other ideas?

 

[Goalie]

You can try running a system file check, however that has many issues, some of which are not forseable, others which are. If you run a system file check, it'll replace files it detects as modified from the original OS. Which means you'll have to reinstall many of your operating system patches, as well as many programs.

However, this may fix your ailments. start->run then "sfc /scannow"

See http://www.updatexp.com/scannow-sfc.html for more details on this.

I will look for more documentation on the MSI engine and updating it in XP when I can.

 

[SNGX1275]

What it means is XP has version 2.0 of that installer already, and you can't update XP to 2.0. Apparently it doesn't want to be re-installed. I checked google's first 30 results or so for this and gave up after not finding a way to re-install it for XP. I found out XP SP2 though has version 3.0 of that installer....

 

[mayesey]

how do i find out if i have sp2 or not? if i dont have it i will try downloading thatbut otherwise i will have to try the scan.

 

[SNGX1275]

You don't have SP2 because its not officially released yet. You can dl XP2RC2 (or at least used to be able to dl it), but I wouldn't recommend doing that.

Do the scan first (I dind't notice goalie's post when I was writing my response - I'm at work so it took me probably 10 minutes to search and write that response), if that doensn't work you can either wait for more advice from maybe someone else or try your luck at SP2RC2.

 

[mayesey]

ok ill try the scan, if not i will wait for the release of sp2

thanks alot

 

[Rick]

Windows Installer 2.0 Redistributable for Windows NT 4.0 and 2000 supports Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 6 or later and Windows 2000. Windows XP contains Windows Installer 2.0 and therefore can't be installed or upgraded by this redistributable.