Peachtree Quantum 2010 install crash and recovery

I had the misfortune today to have to go through the torturous process known as the Peachtree install. Having turned off my AV and turned on my firewall so the installation can poke holes through the firewall, the installation actually went fairly smoothly on the server. 2 hours later though I’m still struggling to install the first client.

The initial installation got all the way through to the end and then gave me an error 1327 which is something to do with installshield and redirected folders. (It’s actually because I launched the setup program using runas, but the program checks for the logged in users data location which the setup program does not have access to).

The next installation, logged on as an administrator almost finished with the status bar filled to the end but the “Peachtree Accounting is performing the requestion operations” had a blank section underneath. Checking the eventlog and temp file locations showed me nothing was actually happening.

After rebooting the machine, the installation would not run again as the product was already installed although no shortcuts had been added to the menu’s anywhere and the software wasn’t in add/remove programs like the install alert said it would be. I ran the Microsoft install cleanup program to remove the software and then started the install again.

This time the software said it was still installed, but going back to the setup splash screen the modify/remove option said the software was not installed.

I called Peachtree and thankfully they answered the phone pretty quickly – the solution is to exit the install program, delete c:\windows\peachinst directory and also the c:\windows\ptx*.ini files.

Note that this worked in my case, it may be specific to Peachtree Quantum and I would recommend you take a backup before deleting files.

I’m not a Peachtree expert by any means so I can’t guarantee this process is safe to do (but worked for me)