Summary

Symptoms

At run time, the installation errors out with one of the following error messages:

• 'Error 1406: Could not write value Folders to key Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\InProgress. Verify that you have sufficient access to that key, or contact support personnel'.

• 'Error 1406: Could not write value VersionMajor to key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINES\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{ProductCode}...'

• 'Error 1406: Could not write to Key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\CLSID\{<GUID>}\In ProcServer32...'

• 'Error - 1406: Could not write InstanceIndex to key...'

Note: The running installation's Product GUID replaces <PRODUCTCODE>. A class ID of a file in the installation that is causing the error message replaces <GUID>.

Cause

There are several different causes to this error message.

• Product Version of the setup is specified incorrectly: This error occurs when the Product Version field within Express contains an alphanumeric value. As per the Windows Installer Service requirement, the product version of setup packages should be a numeric value separated by periods.
  • The format of the Product Version field is major.minor.build, e.g., 2.00.0000 is a valid product version; however, 2.00.beta is not a valid format as it contains alphanumeric values.
    
  • Product version can be specified in an Express project in the Product Version field, under the Organize Your Setup / General Information section.
    
• Insufficient privileges on the machine where setup is being run: Error 1406 normally occurs when the user does not have sufficient privileges to run the installation. Make sure that the user has administrative rights on the machine. If the user is not the administrator on the machine where the error occurs, make sure that the user running the installation does have elevated privileges.
  
• Setup is being run with an older version of the Windows Installer Service: If you are using a version prior to MSI 2.0 with your installation, then switch to MSI 2.0 or later as it has been known to fix this error in various cases.
  
• Setup contains many folders or folder names with long names: This error seems to mainly occur on Windows 95, 98, or ME systems. The error occurs if the setup has many folders created in the Files and Folders section. At build time, Express creates these folders in uppercase to ensure that they are public directories, which are accessible at different points in the installation by the Windows Installer Service. While this does not pose a problem on Windows NT systems, it causes Error 1406 on Win 9.X machines because of a registry size limitation. The registry size limitation on Windows 9.X machines is 16K, which causes Error 1406 when the Windows Installer Service attempts to store these folder paths in the registry. To resolve this behavior, shorten the names of all folders within the Files and Folders section of the Express IDE to less than 9 characters.

• Setup is creating a registry key under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE hive: Make sure that your setup is not attempting to create a registry key directly under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE hive, as the Windows NT system does not support this. The registry key can be created under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software hive. You can check this by going to Registry under the Configure The Target System section of Express 3.x IDE.

Additional Information

For more information on elevated privileges, refer to the following topics in the Windows Installer Help Library:

• Installing a Package with Elevated Privileges for a Non-Admin
• AlwaysInstallElevated

Also refer to Knowledge Base article listed below for additional information.