Troubleshooting: InstallValidate Nulled out my Request

When Windows Installer logs the InstallValidate Action, the MSI engine reports the three states of a the componets and features in the product. For example, the following report says a component current state is absent, the user requested the component to be installed local, and the MSI engine calculated that it needed to do nothing for this component.

MSI (s) <process info>: Component: <Component identifier from Component Table>; Installed: Absent; Request: Local; Action: Null

Among the reasons a component is set to Action: Null:

• The key file exists with a higher version. See File Versioning Rules [Windows Installer] for more information.
• The key file exists with any version, and the component is marked to never overwrite. See msidbComponentAttributesNeverOverwrite in Component Table [Windows Installer] for more information.
• The component has a condition which evaluates to false. See Conditional Statement Syntax [Windows Installer] for more information.
• The key file is protected by Windows. See Windows File Protection on Windows 2000 and Windows XP [Windows Installer] for more information.

More context on reading logs can be had from Checking the Installation of Features, Components, Files [Windows Installer].

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 23, 2005
  Earlier, in my blog, I digested a piece of a legacy internal troubleshooting document into the post:...