I don't think this is very uncommon as noone seems to adhere to MS's standards for MSI files very well.
Microsoft Word XP has 3300 validation warnings/errors some of them serious. It refers to features in Excel and Outlook that are not in the Word msi, the ICE33 errors cause the advertising to fail for some files, etc. There is also some kind of bodge to get the MSI to work on MSI 1.0 and 2.0 which causes loads more errors.
McAfee VirusScan 4.5.1 (the latest corporate edition) has over 130 warnings/errors. Once you have got it to pass validation (obviously never done by McAffee themselves) it still is a dreadful package as it has Custom Actions that look like this "regedit.exe /s _id_rgvs.reg" which need deleting and the reg entries putting into the reg tables.
These are probably the two most widely distributed installations and getting them to pass validation is a major effort.
Anything created in Developer 7 or 8 with InstallScript is also likely to be a bad package. It may pass validation but if the package makes registry entries from InstallScript then they will be unmanagable and impossible to conflictsolve.
What is the solution to having good packages?
-educating vendors to validate their packages so that it's not the responsibility of SysAdmins.
-providing reasonable documentation to SysAdmins so that they can troubleshoot the errors themselves.
Whose responsibility is it to make the documentation? InstallShield? Microsoft? Wise? me? I am hoping that Bob Baker and Robert Dickau's new book on repackaging contains all the answers.
looeee