Summary

Setup exiting\crashing immediately after launch may be due to unsupported bmp format

Symptoms

When running an InstallScript or InstallScript MSI installation, you may encounter a crash during the setup initialization. This knowledge base article will explain one possible cause and solution.

Cause

If you are including a splash screen bmp image with your installation project, there is a limitation with the setup.exe in that it can only use a bmp image file that uses a BITMAPINFOHEADER structure. If your splash screen bmp image file is using different BITMAPV4HEADER structure, the setup.exe is not able to properly handle this and so you see the resulting setup initialization error.

Workaround

If the bmp image is is indeed the cause of the setup initalization error, then you can workaround this by simply opening the bmp image file in a tool like 'mspaint.exe' and then saving the file under this program (...no modification is needed). Since mspaint will use the BITMAPINFOHEADER structure to save the bmp file, and you can now use the updated bmp image in your installation project.

NOTE: mspaint.exe can typically be found under the (C:\Windows\System32) folder.

Additional Information

If the above does not apply to your setup initialization error, you can take a look at the following knowledge base article.
Eliminating General Setup Initialization Errors