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August 25, 2005

Windows Installer Clean Up Utility

Description of the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility

I was getting an error dialog saying:

The feature you are trying to use is on a CD-ROM or other removable disk that is not available. Insert the 'Scan' disk and click OK".

I couldn't browse anywhere on my drive to find the scan.msi file that it seemed to be looking for. I clicked cancel and then got the following error dialog:

Error 1706. No valid source could be found for product Scan. The Windows Installer cannot continue.

The file '1' is not a valid installation package for the product Scan. Try to find the installation package Scan.msi in a folder from which you can install Scan.

I did a Yahoo! Search for variations of my error message and found the solution at Description of the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility

But using the utility is a bit tricky when it comes to finding which "Installed Product" from the list is the correct one to remove. My product appeared to be a HP all-in-one printer that I had removed earlier but I guess the uninstall hung or something. I had to take a guess from the list presented to me. The unistaller was looking for files in c:\temp\HP_WebRelease\setup\Scan\ but I had emptied my temp folder during some previous cleanup.

Here's a snippet from the Readme file:

WHAT IS THE WINDOWS INSTALLER CLEAN UP UTILITY?
You can use the Windows Installer Clean Up Utility to remove Windows Installer
settings from your computer if a problem occurs. Although Windows Installer is
designed to be very robust, Windows Installer can become damaged if any of the
following issues occurs:

- Your computer's registry becomes corrupted.

- You or someone else inadvertently changes a registry setting that is
used by Windows Installer and that causes a problem.

- The installation of a program that uses Windows Installer (for
example, Microsoft Office 2000) is interrupted.

- There are multiple instances of Setup running at the same time, or
an instance of Setup is "blocked."