Background: I was trying to install a new upgrade to Perfect Disk 8 using
its standard built-in upgrade process which uses Windows Installer along
the way. I got a consistent series of failures each culminating in a "The
Windows Installer Service could not be accessed" - type error message.
After a few rounds I tried the upgrade on my two other XP SP3 systems (Pro
and MCE) and a W2K system and it worked fine on each.

I researched everything I could find online about installer failures and
found that the promoted fixes were few and far between but I think that I
eventually tried every one of them, all to no avail. Then, following the
axiom of "undo what you last changed" I uninstalled SP3 which had just been
installed the day before and found that the PD8 upgrade worked as
advertised. The curious thing is that the other two XP systems had SP3
installed within hours of this one from the same CD and those had no
installer problems.

So, what is it I should be looking for next? I can always re-install SP3
but I don't know that I can unwind the PD8 upgrade to the previous version
to retry the same upgrade path a second time. Does anything I've written
here seem at all familiar? Is there some generic way to test Windows Installer?

Problem system is a 3gHz P4, 1gB memory, ATI 9600 video, Shuttle SB65G2
homebuilt system that has been quite stable for years now.

John McGaw
http://johnmcgaw.com