Here’s a quick synopsis of two issues I had at my recent customer installing some “packaged” applications during OSD.

The first was error code 0x80042000 from an InstallShield installation package. This is neither a standard Windows error code or a custom ConfigMgr error code. After some web searches, I stumbled on a blog post by fellow MVP and friend Kenny Buntinx. The symptoms lined up so we gave the solution a shot by adding the /f2 option to the command-line to create a log file. And amazingly, it worked. I have no real idea of why this works except that maybe the package fails if it can’t create the default log file which I think should be in the directory the setup.exe is run from and can’t so adding an alternate log path makes it work.

The second issue had to do with a different package for installing IBM Client Access. This was an ancient package created with an Altiris packaging tool. Unfortunately, this package checks to make sure the OS is Windows XP and only Windows XP. The customer did not know how to re-create the package so using it was the best option — minus the useless OS check of course. Based on a forum post from The App Compat Guy on how to set an exe to run in a compatibility mode without using the GUI, we created a quick script to copy the installer to C:WindowsTemp, add a registry value as described in the forum post, and then execute the installer. The executable had to be copied to the local drive and executed from there because the application compatibility registry value required a fully qualified path and given we were running this from a DP, there was no guarantee the path was going to be the same every time. Worked like a charm.