FSX Installation Failures and Vista

[Guest jabloomf1230]

For the vast majority of FSX and Acceleration users, the initial install goes smoothly. But what if it doesn't? There are a slew of suggestions online as to how to avoid failed installations. There are more issues with Acceleration than with FSX and there are a lot more issues installing both on Vista x64 boxes. If you encounter a failed install and all the "simple" workarounds fail, here's what I suggest:1) Create a temporary folder on your hard drive. Copy the install DVD(s) to this folder. With FSX, a few of the files on the two DVDs are identical, so you can ignore the questions about overwriting, etc.2) Close all non-essential running programs and disable your anti-virus software temporarily.3) Once you have all the files copied, go to the hard drive folder and run all the .msi and other installation type files (Visual C++ redistributable, Windows installer Knowledge Base patches and hotfixes) that you can find that are not in subfolders. The main msi file will not execute this way and you will get an error message that you need to run setup.exe to install this file. It is better to run all of them, than to take the chance that some upgrade to Vista is lacking and will kill the install. This step is critical for Vista x64, if you are having errors associated with the Windows installer. 4) Now, right-click on setup.exe and set it to run as an Administrator and also in Windows XP SP2 compatibility mode.5) Run setup.exe from the hard drive folder. It should complete the installation. If it works, delete the install folder that you created on your hard drive. If it doesn't work, don't bother trying the install again, as there is prolly something corrupt in your overall OS installation.My theory about the install failures is that MS has recently upgraded the Windows Installer (msiexec.exe) under Vista. Especially on the 64 bit systems, the exact mechanism of installing 32 bit software has become quite convoluted and if any needed upgrades to either the 64 bit (in the Windows/System32 folder) or the 32 bit Windows Installer (in the Windows/SysWOW64 folder) or either 64 bit or 32 bit upgrades to any other software that the Installer relies on are missing, the install will fail.I hopes this helps the few of you who are still frustrated with an install failure.