It came time for another Windows 7 posting. It was very close to be a negative posting, sharing some Installer 5 pains. However, with the help of Windows 7 Core teams, that got resolved, so I’d like to share with you my experience and solution, since it could be of someone else’s help.

It all started when I tried to install Visual Studio 2008 Professional. After Setup starts and passes the privilege elevation prompt, it did some verification, and during the parse of Installer data (as it seems to me), it came with this very nasty error message: “A problem has been encountered while leading the setup components. Cancelling setup".

Initially I thought this comes from my setup files, which somehow got corrupted. I retried from our products’ web (where the stuff is verified frequently), but the result was the same. Then I tried my own Visual Studio 2008 Professional installation DVD, and the result was the same. Then I tried evaluations of Visual Studio (C# Express), and the result was the same.

I almost given up. I have already found a similar issue in the Internet, without any encouraging advice.

My last resort was our internal resources. I sent a mail to a principal product manager, who already helped a couple of times, then I crossed my fingers and waited. I knew these guys are very busy, so getting an answer from them was only on their own good will and helpfulness.

Fortunately for me, Steve was extremely helpful again and forwarded my question to the right person. Just few hours later I had the answer in my inbox:

Please try renaming the following registry key:
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows\DisabledSessions

Thanks, Peres! Once I did that, the issue disappeared.

From the registry I’m getting the impression this is an issue with the “Software Quality Management” module. But you can never be sure, of course. That’s why it’s beta software, ain’t it? I’m having the feeling that the error is not connected with Visual Studio setup, but may also be seen with other products’ setup. Also, I heard that in x64 it might not be resolved that easy.

Finally I’d like to share two very interesting links, which I found these days:

• Windows FireStarter Live Meeting Recordings NOW AVAILABLE!, from Veni, Vidi, Velcro blog
• The Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets, from Tim Sneath’s blog, which led me to the very useful tip how to get my Quick Launch toolbar back
• Windows 7 Beta Hotkey Cheat Sheet, from Brandon Paddock’s Blog

Happy hacking!