Installing Branded IE7 on Windows XP Service Pack 3

[NewsBot]

Hi all,

Last week, I blogged about installing Windows XP SP3 and how it affects different versions of Internet Explorer (See my earlier blog post here). Today I will be discussing installing branded/custom versions of IE7 on machines with Windows XP SP3 installed. This post is primarily aimed towards folks who use the Internet Explorer Administration Kit 7 (IEAK7) to create custom IE7 packages, like Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and web developers. If you ever installed the IEAK7, built a custom version of IE7 or distributed a version of IE7 to others, this post is for you.

When installing a branded version of IE7 (like the one you get on a Comcast or Qwest CD when you sign up for their services) on Windows XP SP3 machine for the first time, the IE7 install might fail with the following error:

“Process 'xmllitesetup.exe /quiet /norestart /er /log:C:\WINDOWS' exited with exit code 61681”

The reason is that the IE7 package you are trying to install uses old IE7 files. As you may recall, in October of 2007 we released an IE7 update, which in addition to turning on the menu bar by default and removing WGA validation also addresses the XMLLite issue above.

XMLLite.dll is one of the components that ships with IE7. This DLL is necessary to run IE7, and IE Setup installs this component as part of IE7 installation. XPSP3 contains an updated version of XMLLite.dll, so when you try to install an older version of IE7 on XPSP3 machines, IE Setup fails to install XMLLite since it’s already on your system; hence, you get the error. In the IE7 update, we modified the install logic to only install XMLLite if it’s not already present on the system.

 

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If you produce custom IE7 packages, you need to ensure that those packages will install successfully on Windows XP SP3. You can either try installing IE7 on a Windows XP SP3 system, or for a quick test, you can verify the cache of the IE7 files that were downloaded when generating custom IE7 packages. To verify the cache, on the machine that has the IEAK7 installed, go to C:\Program Files\Microsoft IEAK 7\Download\Win32\\iebin and search for IESetup.msi or IEBrand.msi.

If those files are not present, then you need to perform the following:

1. Download the new IEAK7 available at TechNet.
   
2. Run the new IEAK7 wizard.
   
3. Open the INS file you generated for custom IE7 packages. (You can re-use an existing ins file or create a new one, in which case this step is optional.)
   
4. On the Automatic Version Synchronization screen, click on the Synchronize button. This step downloads the latest IE7 setup files that it will use to generate a new branded package.
   
5. Complete the rest of the wizard, and click Finish.

The new packages will be created in the directory you specified during the beginning of the IEAK Wizard. These new packages will work on XPSP3, so you are ready to distribute them to all your customers.

Thanks,

Jane Maliouta

Program Manager

http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=8495886

 

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