On one of our test PC (a virtual one) with VS 2008 Beta2 installed on Windows XP, we got the following problem. If any of Add-in Express for .NET product packages are installed, uninstalled and re-installed for the second time, the “Error 2908″ message is shown a tremendous number of times. It is obvious that the message is shown for every file included into the package. What is worse, when the setup program is complete, you get this error again when you install or uninstall any MSI-based product. That is, from the common point of view, Windows becomes inoperable. Windows Installer Error Messages doesn’t provide any useful info.
If you google for “Error 2908″, you’ll find out that this error occurs for a number of applications. Workarounds exist for installing Office 2000 on Windows 98 or ME, NET Framework 1.1, Visual Studio 2005. But none of those workarounds worked for us.
Then we found an interesting post on the www.eggheadcafe.com forum: they added Crystal Reports merge modules to their setup and got this error. This resulted in “reinstalling windows on computers affected with the error.” What Microsoft suggested is “ask Business Objects company that produces the Crystal Report for assistance”. As you may assume, Crystal Reports supporters sent poor devils back to Microsoft.
However, we googled out some vague notes that the cause of this error may relate to the number of files included into the package. This was somehow backed up by Orca that reported the following incomprehensible warning message: “Feature ‘DefaultFeature’ has XXXX components. This could cause problems on Win9X systems. You should try to have fewer than 817 components per feature.”
To verify this assumption, we created a simple setup with some 2000 files. Nevertheless, this setup program has run through the install/uninstall/install procedure successfully. But when we added a custom action (Install, Rollback, and Uninstall), we got Error 2098 again. Moreover, it turned out that install/uninstall is enough for breaking the Windows Installer down. Then we found that the number of files that does the trick lies between 1000 and 1022. We don’t know if this number depends on the number of custom actions.
This research forced us to decrease the number of Add-in Express files by moving demo projects to a ZIP archive. And in this way, we overpowered Error 2908.
But this was not the end of the story. We felt obliged to find a way for our customers to restore their PCs if they have got into this trap by installing Add-in Express.
The solution was found by a pure chance. Thank Heavens.
Deleting the following key restores the functionality of the Windows Installer:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\
Installer\UserData\S-1-5-21-1123561945-1935655697-1060284298-1003\
Components\AD95649F068525549B26938D7D18FEA7
We don’t know who created this key: repairing Office and all .NET Framework versions on that PC doesn’t restore the key. Currently, we believe this key is created by Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. We don’t know what impact the deletion of this key may have on any software on that PC.
What makes us think the key is suspicious? The registry contains the following branches:
Further on, I will refer to branch S-1-5-18 as ShortSID and S-1-5-21-1409082233-343818398-725345543-1004 as LongSID.
Our experiments showed that products installed for all users fall into the ShortSID/Products branch. Accordingly, products installed for the current user only, fall into the LongSID/Products branch. For every file in the setup project, we got an entry in the Components branch. This entry contains a registry value whose name refers to the product’s entry in the Products branch. Hope this makes sense :)
The key mentioned above looks suspicious for the following reasons:
Firstly, it is located in the LongSID/Components branch (the registry value is (B3414A45B4B628042B8446B35265C1BC), but, in the LongSID/Products branch, there is no corresponding product.
Secondly, the value of this registry value contains a question mark instead of a colon in the path: C?\WINDOWS\system32\rgb9rast_2.dll
We tried deleting this key and it helped. Finally, we tried creating this key on a clean PC and reproduced Error 2908 with our test setup project.
Conclusions:
1. It required 3 days X 4 developers to fix the problem that, we know for sure, was not engendered by us.
2. Any developer can create a setup project that may make Windows practically inoperable.
3. This developer will be blamed for no reason at all.
Update:
Thanks to Gabe’s comment, another thought crossed my mind: It looks like the mysterious key may be created when you update .NET Framework 2.0 (I’m almost sure the installer for VS 2008 Beta 2 did update it). Sorry we didn’t try to reproduce the “This application must be installed to run. Please run Setup from the location where you originally installed the application.” error reported by Gabe.
A while back I ran into the post stating that deleting the keys that contain values with “C?” allows installing F#.
But all this is very sad indeed, after publishing this article I posted all pertaining information to a Microsoft newsgroup; it was as early as in November 2007, to no avail :(
Last updated on 19-Sep-2009
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Thank you soo much for posting this fix. Had this error 2908 when re-installing Python on Windows XP. Fixed as per your suggestion!
Much gracias… Had this exact same problem installing google app engine. I deleted the key and the error is gone, stupid Windows.
You are a godsend!! I had the error from an installer to fix an error I was getting for the Clean Manger tool and this solved the cleanmgr.exe error bypassing the installer fix.
I had 2 LongSID’s that I deleted to make it work and always remember to export your registry before hacking away at it.
Thanks a lot!
thank you so much. I am pulling my hair off with this issue for a while. This fixed issue with customer
It didn’t work for me, instead now i get three errors
ok i found a solution that worked for me on another page
i went to c:/windows/system32/mscoree.dll and deleted it and open office installed properly
not sure how safe it is, but it worked fine
Deleting any files from that folder is a dangerous experiment. And mscoree.dll is a file that you must never delete!
Thx for the help! Worked perfectly
Thank you so much. It took me 3 days and 2 pages of Google results so find this but thank you. I had a similar issue with installer files but my UserData was not the same I just deleted the ‘component’ for all of them till it worked.
THANKS!!
Thanks alot i’ve been searching alot for the solution the problem finaly has been solved by your help
This problem may be originated by so many sources, like new XP SP3, wrong Microsoft .Net, etc, etc that I could not see any solution nearby. And I have a so tight time frame to finish this work. You saved my day. Thank you so much.
Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!!!!!!
After hours of searching and reading this is the ONE thing that solved the problem!!
It should also be noted that this is the fix for the “This application must be installed to run. Please run Setup from the location where you originally installed the application.” error. At least for Office (2000).
I started receiving this error after switching from an nVidia card to an ATI card. During the install process, I’m almost certain the ATI software asked to install .NET 2.0. I went ahead and allowed it (which in retrospect may have been a mistake because I already had 3.0 and 3.5 installed?). At least I think that might be the cause.
Thanks again! :D
Thank YOU! It makes me think this key might be created when you update .NET Framework 2.0.
I had been unpacking installers myself to get stuff out since I had pretty much given up on finding a solution, but this worked perfectly. Thanks. :)
Thank you!!!
How can I locate that key to delete it? I can’t seem to find it anywhere on my computer, but I get the same error when trying to install MS Office.
Please disregard my previous post, I’m an idiot.
I was having problems with google app engine installation, your solution saved me. Thank You very much :D
I encountered Internal Error 2908 when upgrading OpenOffice.org from 3.1 to 3.1.1.
I did find and delete the registry key AD95649F068525549B26938D7D18FEA7. Unfortunately, the symptom persisted.
I did not find MSCOREE.DLL in WINDOWS\SYSTEM32, though there was one in WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386, and a MSCOREE.TLB in WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727.
I have the install problem (trying to intstall iTunes) However this ’suspicious key’ seems to be in the shortSiD folder. Any ideas what i should do? I dont think I have .Net framework installed. Could this be the problem?
To MetaEd and Jonny.
Unfortunately, I can’t help you with this. We still don’t know what software created this key on our PCs (yes, it’s in the ShortSiD, Jonny). In other words, it’s possible that this issue doesn’t relate to the .NET Framework at all. Sorry, I can’t even give you any decent advice.
Thank you for this! Just saved me a couple of hours of installation.
I deleted C:\WINDOWS\system32\rgb9rast_2.dll and it the installer worked again. P.S.
This error has something to do with rgb9rast_2.dll :|
Thank you for that valuable piece of info! Unfortunately, I’m unable to test this. Maybe other blog readers will be able to test and confirm that deleting the mentioned DLL also solves the issue.
Thanks a lot for this information. I had the same situation with my wix installer. I spent 5 days on this issue, and your writeup solved my issue.
My installer installs on development machines but not in VBox.
The development machines don’t have that key.
Thank you so much! This is a great tip.
Thank you, thank you. This worked for me, and allowed me to install NPCL tools for Visual Studio 2008 (after a lot of head-scratching).
Thanks you very much Gabe.
You are a life saver.
Good job.
I am sure for all the people you helped they will be greatly thankfull to you.
Seems like it is working for me as well…… :-)
Thanks a lot… this has saved my time. I was reinstalling Winmobile 7 (OS, SDK) on XP when ran into this error. I was thinking of formating the XP machine….
Thanks,
Sachin