Fatal Error 1719 – The Adventure!

Trying to push out Backup Exec Remote Agent to one of my terminal servers, and I received an error:

Fatal Error 1719: The windows installer service could not be accessed.

Great.  Had this error once before on this server when I was trying to install this legacy application written for Access 2003.  I was able to work around it by not using the Access 2003 engine it was installing, but using the Access 2010 already installed on that server.  Haven’t seen this error since until now.

So, I hit the inter-webs.  Lots of useful advice, unfortunately none of it worked.  For posterity sake, here is what I tried:

1.  Unregistered and re-registered the Windows installer service

msiexec /unregister
msiexed /regserver

This did not work.  Still got the 1719 error.

2. Ran system file checker to fix any broken system files

sfc /scannow

Restarted my server, tried the install, didn’t work.

3. Tried booting into safe mode, and unregistered and re-registered the service again

regsvr32.exe %systemroot%\system32\msi.dll
%systemroot%\syswow64\regsvr32.exe %systemroot%\syswow64\msi.dll

Restarted, still got the 1719 error.  What the heck?

4.  Examined the registry key regarding the MSI Service.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\msiserver

Compared the values here to two other servers I have and found discrepancies.  Hmmm….. this might be it.  So, I saved a copy of the current registry settings, exported the settings from my other terminal server and imported them into my troubled terminal server.  Restarted just for fun, and tried to install my Symantec Backup Agent again.

And, once again, it failed with the same error.

I went to Symantec’s site and searched for 1719 error.  I got 0 results.  Nothing.  I searched and searched and found nothing.  So, I retried the steps above.  I tried re-registering the service in the system32 and the syswow64 folder.  Nothing I did worked.

So, in desperation I went to  Symantec’s site again, browsed through the categories to get to the Backup Exec 2010 product and began going through the troubleshooting options.  Several pages into it guess what I found?  Yep, an article entitled

When trying to install Backup Exec Remote Agent, Windows reports error “1719 The Windows Installer service could not be accessed

Gee, thanks for having such a great search engine to find this for me 1/2 hour ago!  The first part of the article was worthless, but the very end had a nice tidbit of info worth trying, so I fired up REGEDIT once again and made the following change:

I changed the WOW64 key in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\msiserver from 1 to 0.

After that, the install worked just fine.  Hurray!  Now, to find an email to Symantec’s webmaster and tell them to fix their worthless search engine.

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