PCError

That is actually no solution, but a Workaround for the 80072EFD problem: Instead of this Windows Vista update of the operating system , there’s also the possibility for the Windows Vista update via IE7.

Thus simply start Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) , in the menu EXTRAS (Specials) click the menu option WINDOWS UPDATE . So - now the update should actually work (through all Firewalls etc.).

Unfortunately this is no automated solution, but you can start this manual workaround simply from time to time. I think that is justifiable for your “Security”….

Recently, while attempting to build a Japanese MSI using WiX v3.0, I received an error message that looked like the following:

light.exe : error LGHT0217 : An unexpected external UI message was received: ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???? 2738 ???

I wanted to see the full text of this error message, so I temporarily changed the product language setting in my WXS file from 1041 (the LCID for Japanese) to 1033 (the LCID for English) and re-ran the build. When I did that, the error message was more readable:

light.exe : error LGHT0217 : An unexpected external UI message was received: The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2738.

This message made more sense to me, so from there, I looked at the Windows Installer Error Messages reference for error code 2738 and found the following:

Could not access VBScript run time for custom action [2].

While attempting to narrow down this error further, I found a couple of useful blog posts. As described in this blog post by Heath Stewart, error code 2738 can occur on Windows Vista systems (like the one I was using in the above scenario) if an MSI contains a script-based custom action and the VBScript runtime is registered in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive instead of or in addition to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE hive. Also, as described in this blog post by Bob Arnson, four of the Windows Installer Internal Consistency Evaluators (ICEs) are implemented in VBScript. The offending ICEs are ICE08, ICE09, ICE32 and ICE61.

In my build output, I noticed that light.exe had reported some warnings for ICE03 before displaying this 2738 error. From this, I made an educated guess that it was probably failing while running one of these four ICEs. Then, I used some of the advice that I listed in one of my previous blog posts to unregister vbscript.dll and jscript.dll from HKEY_CURRENT_USER to resolve this error:
Click on the Start menu, choose Run, type cmd and click OK
To unregister the VBScript engine, run this command: reg delete “HKCU\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{B54F3741-5B07-11CF-A4B0-00AA004A55E8}” /f
To unregister the JScript engine, run this command: reg delete “HKCU\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{F414C260-6AC0-11CF-B6D1-00AA00BBBB58}” /f

Once I did that, my build started working as expected. I still do not know how this information ended up in HKEY_CURRENT_USER on my system, particularly because the same build worked correctly on the same machine a couple of days ago. However, I am now back into a state where I can build successfully, and I know of a possible workaround to try if I end up with similar build issues in the future.

One of the difficult things about programming in Windows, and especially with COM, is that when you receive an error code, it can be difficult to find the message that goes with it. I was writing some new LDAP code today against Active Directory, and got this message:
Couldn’t read LDAP property member: COM exception 0×80005010

What does it mean? The “Couldn’t read LDAP property member” was my text, the 0×80005010 part is the HRESULT. Our error handling code tries to find a text message, but it couldn’t, and so made do with just the hex. I fired up errlook, the Microsoft error code lookup tool, but it couldn’t find a message either. Using DevStudio, I searched all of the include files for “80005010″. It found this section of adserr.h:
//
// MessageId: E_ADS_COLUMN_NOT_SET
//
// MessageText:
//
// The specified column in the directory was not set.
//
#define E_ADS_COLUMN_NOT_SET _HRESULT_TYPEDEF_(0×80005010L)

OK, now I knew what the error meant, and I had a symbol to use in my code if I wanted to handle it specially. But I’d like to display error messages at run time. How can I get that text message automatically? The errlook tool couldn’t find the message, so it was natural that my application couldn’t, but could I look further?

Windows stores error messages in DLLs, and the FormatMessage function can take an explicit module handle to a module containing error messages. My application already has a list of modules it searches when looking for error messages. If I could find the DLL with this message, I could get a nice message next time.

To find the error message, I resorted to the blunt instrument of the command line tool strings. It searches binary files for printable strings. Here I’ve told it to search the entire file (rather than interpret the executable format), look for a minimum string length of 10, print the file name along with each string, and look for little-endian 16-bit characters:
$ cd c:\windows\system32
$ strings -a -n 10 -f -e l *.dll | grep “specified column”
activeds.dll: The specified column in the directory was not set.
$

Aha! ActiveDS.DLL is my guy. I registered it into my application’s search list of error modules, ran the app again, and got a nice error message:
Couldn’t read LDAP property member: COM exception 0×80005010:
The specified column in the directory was not set.

Bliss.