strange issue associated with chained MSIs

[manomatt]

Hi,

I have a strange issue that is associated with chained MSIs.

Plot:
=========
I have a project that uses aroung 17 chained msi's. One among them is CrystalReportRuntime 32 bit. (SAP Crystal Reports runtime engine for .NET Framework 4 (32-bit)) with the product version: 13.0.3.612, ProductCode: {AAD476D7-FC64-40BC-85EA-0C1FD98D8375}

Behaviour:
=========
when this Msi is getting installed as part of the chained msi it fails to register some files as shown in the attachment and the whole installation rolls back. But when i run this same installer individually its installing fine.

Please tell me why this strange behaviour is happening?

The Resolution for this issue is to have Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Service Pack 1 Redistributable Package ATL Security Update (vcredist_x86.exe) with the version specified in the event view log message.( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/973544)

but my question here is why this is working when launched individually and not from the chained msi? what happens when an msi gets added as a chain? even without installing "Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Service Pack 1 Redistributable Package ATL Security Update " its working when the msi is lauched individually!! quite strange....

please provide your expert comments.

[enelson]

I'm not sure if this will help however I had an issue with Crystal Report Runtime as a chained MSI. Essentially the program I was packaging had a few components within it that some Crystal Reports runtime .dlls stored within it (Ceridian Insync)which was causing conflicts on the installer and causing it to fail very similar to your error message. (And I could also run Crystal Runtime as standalone - not chained). I dug in to the application and saw these conflicting .dlls and deleted them from the main package so that they didn't install before the chained MSI.

I hope this helps!

[manomatt]

Hi,

I had made a sample msi and included this SAP Crystal Reports msi as a chain. Even though the base or master msi was not having any files still the chained msi was failing. Sothing else is going wrong here... interesting hmm....

[enelson]

I have the same issue now with the SAP crystal reports runtime 13.0.1 32bit. I am attempting to package a program that requires this and have attached it as a chain and it just fails. I can however take the .msi and run it standalone too... very very odd... Howver i believe SAP knows this is an issue

[manomatt]

SAP mentions about msm having this issue but we are using msi and gettting this .. thats even more strange.

[joshstechnij]

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.

More information regarding this error is available here:
Problems with custom actions that depend on the Visual C++ 8.0 runtime files on Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008

[manomatt]

Thankyou for this informative post