Installer has insufficient privileges to access the directory

[grparsec]

I was wondering if anyone has seen this before!

Sometimes when I run my MSI setup I get the following error:

"Error 1303. The installer has insufficient privileges to access this directory: C:\Program Files\MyProduct\MyWebFolder. The installation cannot continue. Log on as an administrator or contact your system administrator."

I am logged in as administrator. I don’t want this to happen when customers are running our setup.

How do I fix this? Any ideas?

By the way, I've set some extra permissions on some of the sub-folders in that directory...could this be the cause of the problem?

Thanks,

Golnaz

[Mike_Marino]

Do you install anything to C:\Program Files\MyProduct\MyWebFolder?

[grparsec]

Mike Marino wrote:
Do you install anything to C:\Program Files\MyProduct\MyWebFolder?

yes I do install my web to that directory.

[Mike_Marino]

Does this happen on only a particular OS?

[grparsec]

Mike Marino wrote:
Does this happen on only a particular OS?

I've only tested on Win 2003 server.

[Mike_Marino]

Are you installing and uninstalling the application a lot on this particular machine?

[Mike_Marino]

Another question, if you run the installer with full UI do you get the retry dialog displayed?

Yet another question, do you have any Upgrade table entries?

[grparsec]

Are you installing and uninstalling the application a lot on this particular machine?
Yes, it's my test vm.

Another question, if you run the installer with full UI do you get the retry dialog displayed?
Yes, I do get the Retry dialog.

Yet another question, do you have any Upgrade table entries?
Yes I do.

[Mike_Marino]

We have seen a similar issue in house where the major upgrade appears to not completely finish before the install begins and creates a locked folder situation.

If you click retry, does it eventually work?

[grparsec]

I hit Retry a few times, but it didn't work. I logged off and logged back in with the same user, ran the setup and it worked!

[Mike_Marino]

When we saw this in house, waiting about 30 seconds before hitting rety seemed to allow the setup to continue.

Other things we noticed:

1. This only occurs on vitual machine (maybe becasue they tend to run slower)
2. We only saw it on VWs with Vista.
3. The setups we saw it on were performaing a major upgrade. It seems the Install started before the uninstall of the previous product was fully complete.

If you have a log of the installation we could compare it to our results to see if it is the same issue.

That said, there is not a really good solution that we know of. However, since this only comes up on VMs, and when running the setup multiple times I am not sure you will see this problem from your customers.

The only time we have seen it is when we run our InstallShield unit tests, which runs many setups on VMs to ensure product quality.