Marc

1) There’s a ULS log entry for, “patchca not found. Falling back”, which seems to correlate with these events, but I can’t find anything in the reflected SharePoint code that triggers this message, which leads me to believe this is generated by one of the Windows Installer Service’s internal methods. As I say, this *seems* to correlate with these events, but I’ve stopped pursuing this line of enquiry with any vigour because I also found that these messages seem to be triggered with or without local admin rights.

2) I cranked the ULS logging up to “Verbose” and uncovered another message, “Begin invoke timer job Product Version Job, id {9BB9D31B-7C8B-4FD7-B52D-5FEC40AA3607}, DB n/a”, which also seems to correlate in some way, since this is getting called by SPMsi.MsiDatabaseQuery. But again, this message seems to get logged when running the job with admin rights as well.

a) Note: I spent a lot of time looking at the Windows Installer Service’s “database” as well. Whether this is a reference to the registry entries that point at packages as described in my original posts, or whether the “database” is the Windows Installed stuff that’s contained in an executable is something that I’m struggling to answer, although I’ve come around to the idea that it must be the latter. Unfortunately the Windows Installer stuff is all very murky and difficult for a non-developer to understand.

b) I tried granting the Farm account Modify, then Full rights on C:WindowsInstaller to see if it might be as simple as File System permissions, but that didn’t change anything.

c) I also tried tweaking AppLocker Windows Installer Policies but had no joy there either. Part of what I did there had to do with loosening security on “C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft SharedSERVER14Server Setup Controller”, but again, I had no joy.

I also tried picking all of this apart with Process Monitor but that is a truly overwhelming undertaking with this quantity of information. And basically I failed to pick out any meaningful patterns where the results were not “SUCCESS”.

I have some more detail about other things that didn’t work to-date, and some screen shots to support this stuff, which I can document in another blog post if it’s useful. Please let me know if that would be of any use. I’m still kind of clinging to the hope that I might figure this out some day, while partly resigning myself to the possibility that this may just be how the Windows Installer works, since it kind of makes sense that it wasn’t really designed to work without admin rights.

Has anyone found a solution to this? 200+ errors and informational errors every night is quite annoying. Thanks!

Time is very precious at the moment but I’m still working on that. I will produce a new post if I can crack it. Cheers!

Tristan

After fixing my farm to prevent the DCOM errors, i still seem to get the MSI Installer Warning Event (EventID 1015) in my log each time i run the Product Version Job. By following your fix should this problem have been resolved?

Any help or suggestions on this would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks in advance

Mark