I have a product (Basic MSI) that does NOT require admin rights for installation. But when tested on Win2003 Server (SP2), it prompted the error "The system administrator has set policies to prevent this installation" immediately after trying to execute the setup.exe from an non-admin account.
If I go back to admin account and modify registry by adding HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer:DisableMSI (=0), now install from the non-admin account is working.
But we would like not to modify system registry if we can, and the change could potentially affect other MSI products installation. So I am wondering if anyone who has experienced the same issue and has any alternate solutions?
If there is anything we can do in the installer side, it's preferred. We have set "Require Administrative Priviliges" to "No" since we want non-admin to be able to install it.
The confusing part is that the same non-admin install works fine on XP and Vista (BSN), is there anything on Win2003 I should check for that may fix the problem?
The log created only has the simple output with the failure:
Info 1625.This installation is forbidden by system policy. Contact your system administrator. D:\path_to\prod.msi MSI (c) (E0:F4) [15:26:52:099]: Product: Prod 1.0 -- Installation failed.
Instead of manually setting the DisableMSI registry key, you can also use Group Policy to change the setting, which is more convenient for computers that are members of a Windows domain.
