Windows Installer and Encrypted Directories

Since I've been forced to use my XP laptop more recently, I decided to re-install VersionTracker to keep me notified of any important updates. As I have come to expect, this failed. Even better, it failed in a fairly similar way to the iTunes problems I was having in my last post. An error message of "The system cannot open the device or file specified" and an Event Log ID of 10005.

What on earth is going on here? Deciding to now do a more general search on this issue, I fairly quickly came across the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article titled, 'You receive a "cannot open the device or file specified" error message when you try to install a Windows Installer package.'

Ay, caramba! I would have thought a better fix would have been to correct the fairly fundamental flaw in Windows Installer than to try and bugger around with removing encryption from various directories. After all, a good standard install of XP should have all home directories encrypted for each user to prevent access from other users and people with physical access to your computer (especially if you've got a laptop like I have.)

But seeing how this seems to be disrupting more and more installs lately, I decided to make my TEMP and TMP directories unencrypted with the assumption that important data shouldn't be living in there anyway, and the directories should be regularly cleaned up to not leave data lying around there for long.

But as the KB article also suggests, it appears that a lot of the time that the directory you are running the installer from has to be unencrypted as well. *sigh* There goes installing from my desktop from now on. I have to download to my temporary (unencrypted) directory and then install from there. Oh, to have the cute little "Downloads" folder pop-up that gives quick, one-click access to recent downloads that was in the recent OS X "Leopard" release on XP...

This worked for VersionTracker. I then decided to try and do a bit of other upgrading to see if I could stumble across any other issues. I did. There was an update available for Adobe Reader and lo and behold, it downloaded and failed to update correctly. Digging behind the scenes (now I knew what to look for), I found that it was downloading to

C:\Documents and Settings\lee\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\Updater5\Install

*sigh* again. This directory is obviously encrypted (as is every directory under my home by default) as well. Luckily I noticed that the Adobe updater has an option to configure where it downloads its updates to, so I pointed that out to a suitable unencrypted directory and now it works as well.

But it's inevitable that I am going to keep having issues with Windows Installer files until they fix this brain damaged flaw. Each and every application that decides it wants to use it's own directory for automatic updates will trigger off this problem that I will need to go in and fix by hand. I guess I should be grateful that at least I know how to recognise the problem now and how to quickly fix it. Hopefully this post might help someone else as well.

I hate Windows. I hate stupid, lazy programmers even more.

I do like gardens however.