Windows 8 and Autodesk products, Installer issue

May 06
2014

On several Windows 8 machines there was a problem with Windows Installer that tried to execute the setup of AutoCad LT 2013 or DWG TrueView 2015.

Unfortunately, I could not find anything usable using my best troubleshooting friend: Google.

The solution for DWG TrueView

The solution came from looking in the event viewer under the Windows item, Applications. There was a error message like this one:

“Erkennung von Produkt “{5783F2D7-E028-0409-0100-0060B0CE6BBA}”, Feature “P” und Komponente “{370E1EB0-04EF-4807-8B56-4562457473B8}” fehlgeschlagen. Die Ressource “C:\Users\Lukas\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\WebServices\Dummy.txt” ist nicht vorhanden.”

But the user “Lukas” was the one that installed DWG TrueView on this machine, and other users had not access to this file. The solution was simple: create a file “dummy.txt” in a directory accessibile to all users (I opted for “C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\Dummy.txt”, search the reference in the registry (was the entry “7D2F3875820E9040100000060BECB6AB” in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\S-1-5-18\Components\0BE1E073FE407084B86554265447378B) and change the file location.

The solution for AutoCAD unfortunately was not so fast: in the eventviewer I could see that the installer tried to access a registry entry, precisely this one:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT(64)\TypeLib\{76B039F4-D977-4B80-8DEB-DCD74D6B337F}\1.0\0\win64\

Using RegEdit, I could not read that entry because it was not accessible. So I needed to change first the owner of the respective registry tree to “Administrators” and then add the right to read for all users – unfortunately several steps because this was to repeat for 3 different items, and the subitems became only visible after adjusting the properties of the owner item.

Addendum: DWG TrueView 2014 had the same issue as AutoCAD 2013.

It seems that the guys at AutoDesk have to adjust their installers….