Virtual Earth 3D Installer fails with “Installation failed, check the log file for more information.”

We’ve recently integrated the Virtual Earth service in to our on-line application. However, we’ve had some issues when clicking on “3D” the installer kicks off and then you get a helpful error message:

—————————
Virtual Earth 3D Installer
—————————
Installation failed, check the log file for more information.
—————————

We have an authenticated proxy server which it appears the installer doesn’t cope with particularly well. After much hunting it appears that the ‘log file’ is in fact %TEMP%\InstallLog.txt
The key part appears to be:

[2007/09/11 18:53:01.180] DownloadManager: Queued 'http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=93683' for download to 'C:\Program Files\Virtual Earth 3D\VirtualEarth3D.msi'...
[2007/09/11 18:53:01.180] DownloadManager: Beginning data download for 'http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=93683' to 'C:\Program Files\Virtual Earth 3D\VirtualEarth3D.msi'
[2007/09/11 18:53:01.196] DownloadManager: Download complete for 'http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=93683' to 'C:\Program Files\Virtual Earth 3D\VirtualEarth3D.msi'
[2007/09/11 18:53:01.196] SystemState: Checking the installation state for Virtual Earth 3D.
[2007/09/11 18:53:01.211] InstallManager: Queueing MSI install of 'C:\Program Files\Virtual Earth 3D\VirtualEarth3D.msi' with paramaters ''...

Looking in the Virtual Earth 3D directory the VirtualEarth3D.msi file is just 4kb. Thus, all you need to do is download and install the msi directly from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=93683

I’m not sure if Microsoft will retain the hyperlink when they release a newer version of the 3D client, thus you may need to check your installer log for a newer link.

Error 0x85010001 when syncing on Windows Mobile

We have half-a-dozen Windows Mobile 6 WM6 devices (HTC S710 Vox / Orange SPV E650) which sync with our internal Exchange 2003 server.

We also have a password policy where users must change their password every 30 or so days with accounts locking-out if an incorrect password is specified 5 times. Internally we use MS ISA Server 2004 set as an authenticated web proxy.

This means that on each device the users’ domain password is in there twice (once under activesync / exchange and once under proxy). This can have the unfortunate side-effect that when the user changes their password on their PC the phone continues to use the old password until the account gets locked out. This is without going in to XP’s annoying prompting for proxy server authentication on a locked-out account and then caching the password (grrrr…)

Today this happened as usual and I set about unlocking the account and ensuring the correct password was set under Windows Mobile throughout. However no matter what I did the phone wouldn’t sync either over-the-air or on the cable going in to the activesync error all I was seeing was 0x85010001 which having done some hunting is password related – no surprise there.

I mucked about with Active Directory settings for the account, several password changes, proxy settings, GPRS settings all to no avail.

SOLUTION

Switch the phone off and on again – yip it really is that simple. What a pile of crap.