Tag Archives: Installation
Office

Fixed: Office 2010 installation with MAK key gives Error: Can’t decode PIDKey – Invalid digits! ErrorCode: 0(0x0)

By on Monday, September 2, 2013

After doing an administrative installation of Office Professional Plus 2010 for a client, I was trying to test the installation of office on a desktop machine but kept getting “Error: Can’t decode PIDKey – Invalid digits! ErrorCode: 0(0x0).” as the error message. I confirmed that the key was correct by doing a manual installation of the software and using the same product key that was successful. I was unable to find any useful pages on the internet with this error message so ended up logging a call with Microsoft Product Support to troubleshoot the installation.

Our troubleshooting steps were to remove the updates folder completely and try an installation – this worked so we knew the problem was in the updates directory. Recopying back the files from the extracted service pack 1 dvd worked successfully so the problem was either service pack 2 or the setup.msp file. I copied back the sp2 files and again the software installed successfully (note that having a virtual test pc makes these tests very easy. No uninstalling of office required!)  Again the installation was successful. I then copied the setup.msp file back into the updates directory and the installation failed again. As the configurations that are made in the setup.msp can either be set in the config.xml or group policy it was ok to proceed without using the setup.msp.

Full details of the log files and more information can also be found at the Microsoft forums where I posted the initial request for help.

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Powershell

Fixed: Installing Powershell 3 fails on Windows7 with “The update is not applicable to your computer”

By on Saturday, September 8, 2012

Powershell 3 was released this week and is now available to download for Windows 7 (sp1) platforms. I tried to install it on my home machine this weekend and got
“The update is not applicable to your computer”. It turns out that this is actually because .net framework 4 (or higher) has not been installed.
The full .net 4 framework package is available at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17718 or you could install the newer 4.5 framework at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30653. Make sure that you close the false powershell installation before attempting the .net installation or the .net will try to install for about 5 minutes on your computer and then complain that another install is already in use and does not give you the option to retry. You can only abort and then run the whole installation again. All in all a pretty bad user experience for trying to install the software.

Thanks to the Troubleshooting guide for the beta version of Powershell 3 that tipped me off for the pre-reqs which are not mentioned on the original download page for Powershell 3 and unfortunately there is no place on that web page to provide feedback.

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AntiVirus Trend Work

Preventing Trend Micro from scanning server after the umpteenth time of installation.

By on Wednesday, June 2, 2010

When you have a problem with Trend and have to keep reinstalling it on the server, it gets extremely frustrating waiting for the agent to do a prescan and then fail to complete the install due to “unable to install the client/server security agent.Contact Trend Micro support. Error copying FlowControl.dll”

The problem of flowcontrol.dll can be fixed by deleting the trend micro\Client Security Agent folder after you have uninstalled the software. If you get a problem deleting perficrcperfmonmgr.dll then unregister it with regsvr32 /u perficrcperfmonmgr.dll  Wait a few seconds and then rename the Client Security Agent folder to .old.  Repeat the installation and the software should install with no problems.  (Note that you may have to reboot if the Security Agent service fails to stop)

To prevent the server from rescanning for virus’s (which after all it has been doing in the past and will take a long time on a server), edit the autopcc.ini that can be found in the \\server\ofcscan\autopcc.cfg folder.  Change NoPreScan to 1 instead of 0 and then run the autopcc.exe install program.

For what it’s worth, we are looking at using Trend due to some of the features such as the Remote Manager capabilities and the fact that they do seem to listen to their users and resellers.  I had a good training session with one of their Technical managers a week ago which was really great. unfortunately the install that sparked this blog post has caused me no end of problems and Symantec would be a much more efficient install in this case.

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