Off the record - Craig Box

Found an interesting problem this morning - Access 2003 fires up Windows Installer (msiexec.exe) every time you start it, and for users without administrator rights, it just doesn't go.

After looking at dozens of newsgroup posts and trying a few solutions, I finally had enough debugging information to find the solution that worked: registry keys are missing from HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Jet\4.0\Engines. Copy them from another machine (changing paths where required) and it works again!  Would of course love to know what caused a bunch of registry keys to just disappear...

For those interested, I found that msiexec was writing to a log file using Filemon, and the log file contained the error "Cannot Open Jet XL ISAM registry key" - descriptive enough to find the solution.