"Error 1327". Any way to bypass the USER SHELL FOLDERS check?

[stephenejones]

"Error 1327". Any way to bypass the USER SHELL FOLDERS check?

Hi all,

This is my problem.

We have a rather convoluted and complication network set up currently as we are mid-migration from Novell to AD.

Our workstations currently authenticate against both Novell (via Netware client v3.92), and Active Directory (i.e. computers are members of the domain).

We are trying to use the AD Group Policy Software Installation to push some MSI's to install at logon time, but we have this problem:

In USER SHELL FOLDERS, amongst others, we hard redirect DESKTOP to a network drive (G:\) - driven by Novell.

The big problem is that Novell is a little sluggish at sorting out the drive mapping, and in the time its 'thinking about it', AD Group Policy Software Installation has already piped up to install the MSI.

The MSI I'm building is a simple one to add some shortcuts on the desktop and start menu, but it fails on the classic "Error 1327. Invalid Drive G:\" because at the point of installing, the G: drive isn't available.

Even if I modify my MSI to only install shortcuts to non-redirected paths (i.e. "C:\%USERPROFILE%\Start Menu", the MSI still fails with this error because I believe the standard behaviour of the Windows Installer is to check HKCU...USER SHELL FOLDERS.

Is there anyway of bypassing this check within the MSI?? So, it ignores whatever re-directed registry keys are in HKCU...USER SHELL FOLDERS??? This way, I could still get the MSI to complete the installation wityh failing and place shortcuts where I want them.

Any ideas?? I presume it is Windows Installer that does the USER SHELL FOLDERS check by design. Is there anyway of modifying by MSI file to 'fool' it into thinking the G:\ drive is there, just to complete the install?

Appreciate that my environment is really the problem, but this can't change for a while until Novell is totally out of the picture.

Thanks in advance,
Stephen

[robsons3]

I'd be very interested in a "fix" for this as well. Currently we have to export the HKCU shellfolder settings, set it back to a path on the local machine, run the install, then import our shellfolders settings. It can probably be done in a ca at beginning and end of your sequences. Quite annoying, especially when the installs don't even use any of the paths mapped in shellfolders.

[stephenejones]

Hi,

Thanks to a very kind fellow over on another board, the secret is to use Microsoft's Orca editor to strip out any entries in the Directory table of the MSI, which may be causing it to fail (i.e. check paths that do not exist).

Stephen

[TsungH]

FYI, it could have been done in Direct Editor view.

[OMSTEF]

I think that the best way is to make a CA which change directory of user shell folders like "Set Directory".