I tried to install XPS Essentials Pack(aka XPSEP) many times on my PC, but all failed, the error message is,

“There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A program run as part of the setup did not finish as expected….”

My PC has installed Windows XP SP3, and .NET Framework 3.5.
After searching, I got the following solution,

There is a brute force solution to that :-)
1. Make sure you uninstalled the .NET 3.x things (no %windir%\system32\xpsviewer folder anymore)
2. Make sure you have WIC installed or install it.
3. Get yourself Orca, the MSI database editor from MS (you may have to get a Windows Platform SDK in order to get access to the Orca.msi); I used Orca 3.1.4000.2049
4. Make a copy of your XPSEP MSI.
5. Right-click on the copy – “Edit with Orca”
6. Go to InstallExecuteSequence.
7. Find the Row labelled WICUpdateInstallAction – Right-click – “Drop Row”.
8. Save.
9. Double-click the MSI copy you just edited.
10. Hopefully, the installer should run through fine.
11. Reinstall .NET 3.x and all other things you uninstalled beforehand.

unlucky, I can not successfully uninstall .NET 3.0, So I tried on my Virtual PC, it did not install SP3 and .NET Framework, and succeeded.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 11:32 am and is filed under Windows, XPS, tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.