Happy new year, all. A short and relatively under-researched one to kick off 2007, as I’m suddenly very busy with multiple projects. Just to keep those Google fires burning….
I’m currently taking over a maintenance project from a co-worker. The architecture in question integrates our CMS with Raiser’s Edge, the charity-oriented system from Blackbaud for tracking people, their donations, gifts, bequests etc. It’s a comprehensive but sprawling system, and because of licence limitations all data changes have to go through their equally sprawling API.
A prerequisite of development is that I install the RE client libraries on my machine: actually inside a Windows virtual machine sitting on my Linux box. The first time I tried this, it was over our between-offices ADSL line. That wasn’t terribly successful, owing to the enormous .cab archives included in the distribution. In fact, even stopping it half-way was unsuccessful because of the network delay, so the process had to be killed.
Unfortunately this meant that a later attempt at installation off a CD failed. The error report was, unhelpfully:
Error
Error Number: 0×8004041B
Description: Unknown Error
Setup will now terminate
There’s no clue as to what spoor the previous installation has left behind, nor is there any suggestion of what I might do to fix the problem. Although I’ve since found a solution for the error via Google, I thought it might be good to post it here, along with a possible reason for the error in the first place. Some of the reports of the solution are behind Blackbaud’s login system; some of them are on web feeds that might expire.
The registry key stores something to do with the date that you’re making the installation. To resolve the error, set your computer’s—or your virtual machine’s—clock to January 31, 2006. It probably needs to just be set in the past, but that suggestion worked. Once you’ve changed the clock, perform the install, which ought to go without a hitch. Afterwards, reset the clock to whatever the current date might be.
Why the error popup couldn’t just say that, I don’t know.
