Network Issues prevent certain Installations (otherwise known as 0xc000000f)

I have recently been setting up a Hyper-V laboratory for a Windows 7 project.  I had all the machines installed, and I was configuring them using an RDP connection rather than using VMConnect (the reason is that it is nice and easy to get access to files that are outside the VM this way, simply use \\tsclient\c (or any other drive letter) in order to get access to the C: drive of the local computer from the VM).

 

So, I popped the Microsoft Office 2007 DVD into the drive on my laptop in order to install it, but upon running setup.exe I was getting the below error:

As is sometimes the case, the error message was pretty useless.  “The application failed to initialize properly (0xc000000f)” doesn’t really mean that much to me, and my first thought was that it was a problem with a scratched or dirty DVD.  However, when I then tried to install some anti-virus software, I got the same exact error message, but this time I had launched the setup file from my local C: drive, thus eliminated dodgy media as the cause.  A search on the web turned up no results at all (it seems that when Windows Vista fails to boot right it also displays the error 0xc000000f) apart from non-related issues.

In the end, I worked out that it seemed to be a problem with running the install over the network, because by copying the files inside the VM, all the applications installed correctly with no further fuss.  Now, there is normally no issue at all with running an installation over the network (think SMS/SCCM) so I suspect that this is something specific to using the \\tsclient paths from RDP inside a virtual machine – either that or I completely did something wrong – this is always a possibility :-(

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 29, 2009
  You're not alone in this.  Most of our shared servers run NetWare, but they emulate Windows Servers using the CIFS protocol.  This has never been a problem with Windows XP clients.  Starting with Windows Vista, we had to loosen the LMCompatibilityLevel to 2 on each client to use these servers, but then everything ran fine. However, starting with Windows 7, I can't launch applications from these servers at all, always getting the same error you recorded.  This is perfectly consistent on the 4 computers on which I've installed Windows 7 RC, and the one where I'd installed Windows 7 beta before.  Changing the Security zone for these servers (from Internet to Trusted) makes no difference.  Loosening the LMCompatibilityLevel down to 1 makes no difference.  The exact same executables run fine when launched from a true Windows server, or when launched from any local hard drive (even external USB). I can't find any mention of this problem anywhere in Microsoft's or Novell's knowledgebases or support forums.  And this is a "show-stopper" for us: though we're slowly migrating our file servers to Windows, I can't make it a requirement in time for Windows 7. So, if you hear any ideas about how to fix this, or even troublehsoot it further, please share them!  I'm desperate.

• Anonymous
  January 19, 2010
  The Window7 issue is addressed here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978869