Symptoms
Adding SAP Crystal Reports .msi as a Chained MSI causes a 1904 error.
If SAP is installed manually standalone the error does not occur - only when its included as a chained MSI
Cause
SAP .msi is not a suitable candidate for chaining.
The HRESULT in this error message indicates the following: "The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log or use the command-line sxstrace.exe tool for more detail."
Essential what this indicates is the side-by-side dependencies (in this case, the VC runtime) needed to load the crtslv.dll file are not present. Because the VC runtime files are installed as side-by-side dependencies on Windows Vista and newer versions of Windows, such assemblies are not usable in the installation itself except in a commit custom action or an action sequenced after InstallFinalize. Before this point, the assemblies are not yet available.
While this issue should also be occurring with the MSI installed by itself on a machine that does not already have these dependencies installed (the MSI is installing the VC runtime assemblies since it included the VC runtime merge modules), the situation is made worse if the package is included in a chained transaction because the package isn't committed and finalized as normal until all other MSIs in the chain have installed successfully (at which point Windows Installer runs the commit and finalize for all the chained packages).
Since this is a third party MSI package and the issue can't be resolved with it directly, the best solution here would be to install the VC runtime dependencies before this package (and any other MSI package in this chain) is installed. This would guarantee that the VC runtime dependencies are available before they are needed.
Additional Information
Discussed on our Forums here:
http://community.flexerasoftware.com/showthread.php?202527-strange-issue-associated-with-chained-MSIs Discussed on SAP forums here:
https://archive.sap.com/discussions/thread/3366125
