Back from Vegas + Expression Installation issues

Well MIX (Vegas) was an awesome ride – met so many of the big names in the industry and it’s really renewed my passion for development.

I’ve been mucking about with Expression Encoder so I can do some Adaptive Streaming stuff (saw it at MIX) and I’ve had nothing but troubles installing it.  I originally had Expression Web SuperPreview Beta installed on my work Windows 7 laptop.

The problem arose when I installed Expression Studio then had to apply Service Pack 1 to Expression Encoder so I could get adaptive streaming.  The service pack installed successfully but the Adaptive Streaming option still didn’t appear in Encoder for me and all my Google searches were returning “check you’re not running a trial/beta” of Expression Encoder and I knew I wasn’t so it seemed I was on my own.

I tried many things including uninstalling and reinstalling from scratch (even removing SuperPreview Beta) and I but then I couldn’t reinstall Expression Blend or Expression Design (other Expression products were fine).

The error I got was (had to look through the setup log file)

9:11:06 AM Wednesday, 20 May 2009: Info: Config_Products_InstallNew: Begin installation of new product: Microsoft Expression Blend 2
9:11:06 AM Wednesday, 20 May 2009: Info: Config_Products_InstallNew: Product: Microsoft Expression Blend 2 Params: E:\Setup\Blend_en.msi ADDLOCAL=ALL ARPNOMODIFY=”1″ PRC_DEPENDENTPRODUCTIDS=”ExpressionStudio_2.0.133.0″ PRC_DEPENDENTPRODUCTNAMES=”Microsoft Expression Studio 2″ INSTALLLOCATION=”C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Expression” REBOOT=ReallySuppress SETUPSOURCEDIR=”E:\Setup” SOURCEDIR=”E:\Setup”
9:11:12 AM Wednesday, 20 May 2009: An error occurred installing the Blend_en.msi package. Error: Could not open key: UNKNOWN\Components\B415C33F1AE542B409CF6C47789B0269\9C1E1983E9E82E340B90D600B8DC6796.   Verify that you have sufficient access to that key, or contact your support personnel. .

So after much mucking about and even trying Windows Install Cleaner I still couldn’t get it to go and finally stopped and thought about the error message;

An error occurred installing the Blend_en.msi package. Error: Could not open key: UNKNOWN\Components\B415C33F1AE542B409CF6C47789B0269\9C1E1983E9E82E340B90D600B8DC6796.   Verify that you have sufficient access to that key, or contact your support personnel. .

I knew it shouldn’t be a permissions error which is why I kind of ignored it in the first place (the account I was using was actually a Domain Administrator account) but out of options I out ProcessMon from SysInternals and filtered it to the Expression installation process, specifically access denied messages to the registry.

When I found the offending key it would seem as though the ACL was stuffed – There was no owner or permissions on it so I had to take ownership of the key then give myself permissions.

I attempted to reinstall but again still no joy – same error but on a different key in the registry so I repeated the above about 10 mores times then it finally started working!