This is the first of many posts in my “Brain Busters” category, which will be documenting all the horrendously stupid problems that I encounter with computers that aren’t simple fixes. The kind that take a bit of detective work, and hopefully by documenting them I can save someone else out there the headaches in trying to get to the bottom of the same problems.

I have just reinstalled my  eeePC with XP Pro (That will definitely get it’s own Brain Buster article later…what a PITA!) and during it I thought it would be a good idea to streamline Windows XP Pro SP3 into my installation, seeing as though the installation disc I have is only SP1. All was going swimmingly, I installed all the updated drivers which improved my battery life quite a bit as well as some study programs to use over the weekend in preparation for my 70-290 Exam. That was until I tried to install Microsoft Office 2007, which in one word, FAILED!

When installing, the installation would continually just stop and start rolling back installation, with no other explanation than:

The Windows Installer service cannot update one or more protected Windows files

Worn out from work and vegging on the couch watching TV while doing all of this; I just didn’t have the brain power to try and work out what the issue is, so I just started doing stuff without any thought what so ever. I figured it must be my virus scan software preventing a file from being modified, so first disabled it; no success. Then I uninstalled it; no success. Then I tried installing in safe mode; no success.

Finally I decided there wasn’t any easy fixes to this problem and I would actually have to start the brain going and work it out. I opened up Event Viewer to see if I could find something in there, which i did:

Source: MsiInstaller
Type: Error
Description: Product: Microsoft Software Update for Web Folders (English) 12 — Error 1933. The Windows Installer services cannot update one or more protected Windows files. SFP Error: 21. List of protected files:\r\nc:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\40\bin\fp4autl.dll

So finally we are on to something, I open up windows explorer to go and have a look for the file…which doesn’t exist. So obviously it can’t modify a file that doesn’t exist, but just spits back at you that its “protected”. So I set about finding where I can find this file and stumbled across this Microsoft Support Article. It indicates that you can find fp4autl.dll in a cabinet file on the XP installation cd; \i386\Fp40ext.cab. So i extracted the specific file from that cabinet to the directory it needed to go in. When I ran installation again, it was a complete success and installed perfectly!

I suspect from the file name and location that it is a Frontpage file that generally gets installed with Windows XP. But because I had streamlined the SP3 into my installation, it must not install it for some reason. When Office 2007 installs, as it has Frontpage, it tries to update this “system” file. But because it doesn’t exist, it can’t, and therefore installation halts. A simple fix in the end though.