Monday, October 4, 2010

MSI issues with SQL Server 2005 and Vista

Anyone who has worked in systems admin for more than a week would probably have run accross at LEAST one issue in the Microsoft world where a program would NOT uninstall correctly.
As a matter of fact, there are numerous KB's and newsgroups and web gripes about this issue, dating back to the pre-XP world. The "nice" thing, as with most things MS, is that not one of these fixes works for ALL issues of this type. My particular issue recently was the uninstallation of SQL Server 2005 (Standard and Express, 32-bit and 64-bit) from two Vista Pro 64-bit machines.

So, I first did what any self-educated genius would do.
From the command line I ran:
c:\windows\system32\msiexec.exe /unregister
c:\windows\system32\msiexec.exe /regserver
c:\windows\sysWOW64\msiexec.exe /unregister
c:\windows\sysWOW64\msiexec.exe /regserver

...thinking this would fix my issue. However those nagging errors kept popping up. Oh yeah, did I forget to mention the errors I was recieving? I recieved to MSI errors: 1719 and 1603. Looking this up will produce the numerous KBs, newsgroup postings, etc. that I alluded to above. Additionally, I recieved an error message indicating that the Windows Installer Service could not be initiated due to system permissions and to contact the system administrators and to...blah blah blah...

So what fixed it, some might be asking:
Downloading the MSI Clean up utility from MS (MSICUU2.exe) and running this on the boxes in question. However, for some unkown and yet distinctively MS-type behavior, running the MSICUU2.exe from the GUI (right-click->run as administrator) did not work.
What did work was using the command line to access the MSICUU2.exe application via the command line AND using the runas command.

So, Vista again dissappoints and makes me wish EVERYTHING was *nix. It is dissappointing that the GUI option to run as an administrator has seperate permissions than the command line option to run as an administrator. You just "have" to love Windows. :-(

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Skype shot my CSS in IE8!!!(???)

I recently had to create two seperate webpages that both used two differing Cascading Style Sheets. Each page needed to allow for the viewer to change between stylesheets. A task that should be easy...but one that proved that testing in the browser doesn't automatically indicate compatability with brower plug-ins. This is apparently especially true with Internet Exploder Explorer.

What I did: Tested both pages in Firefox and IE8. Both pages would initially load correctly. The initial "index.html" worked as advertised in both browsers: the viewer was able to switch repeatedly between CSS's through the use of some simple Javascript buttons. However, the second page (stored in the same parent directory and using the EXACT same relative paths) would NOT use the first stylesheet in IE8 after the initial page load. It would toggle between stylesheets, but when stylesheet 1 was selected, the viewer was presented with default, left-align, text.

What I have:

  • Skype

  • Windows 7 Professional

  • IE8

  • Firefox 3.6.10


Debugging/Troubleshooting:
There were NO issues with FireFox, so I was automatically inclined to believe that the failure lied with Microsoft. I re-wrote the webpage at least six times (not that fun) and re-wrote the CSS sheets at least three. Additionally, all were validated multiple times through the W3C tools (XHTML and CSS). However, NOTHING seemed to work.

The Lightbuld:
I decided that maybe I should try to isolate from outside my current box. My wife's computer is exactly the same, with the exception of not having Skype installed (I try to avoid having Skype as much as possible, which is a WHOLE different topic). On her laptop the webpages BOTH acted correctly between the two stylesheets, on both IE8 and FireFox. I did run the IE8 Developer Tools (F12) in attempt to identify the issue, but that was no help. It was when I looked at the plug-ins that I noticed a difference:
It MUST be the Skype plug-in.

Now What:
All I can deduce at this point is that the Skype Add-in for IE8 (the one that allows you call-by-click from numbers on website) is the culprit. However, I have NOT been able to identify why. I do seriously wonder if this is an indication of how IE8 renders XHTML pages when the Skype plug-in is installed, and, MORE IMPORTANTLY, if this is not an indication of a bug in skype that could indicate a vulnerability between IE8, Skype, and parsing. I haven't had a lot of time to research this, so at this point it is purely conjecture based upon what I have seen. However, I do have a friend who had the EXACT problem and indications that Skype is the culprit.

Yet One MORE reason NOT to like Skype!