Friday, December 16, 2005

Installing Delphi 2006

A few days ago, I received my shiny, fresh, the latest and greatest Delphi 2006 in a beautiful package. Very exciting! With much regret, I had to put it aside because I was busy at work and I simply didn't have time to play with it yet. I put it on my table, and I squinted at it occasionally while working on my current project using Delphi 7.

Then yesterday evening I finally got around to giving it a try. Needless to say, I was very disappointed when I couldn't install it right away. I had the following problems:

First, I got InstallShield error saying something like "Failed to extract file 'Dll_.ini' from the binary table".
I googled for the error message and came up with a solution: run DCOM configuration utility (dcomcnfg.exe) and grant the necessary user(s) and/or group(s) the default launch permissions.
Initially, I only included the local Administrators group (which my interactive user account is a member of) and also specifically my interactive user account (which was probably unnecessary). This solved the above problem but the installation still failed a bit later... with a message roughly like "Installation interrupted, nothing installed". I checked my running processes and noticed that Windows installer (msiexec.exe) is running under local SYSTEM account. So I granted the default launch permissions to this account, too.

That solved the problem and I have now successfully installed Delphi 2006!
W00t! It feels like Christmas already! ;-)