*** New Member has exactly *one* long-standing problem with system!*** [ Edited ]

[Michael_King]

first i'd like to say hello to everyone . . . i just signed up today . . . in fact i just found out today these forums even exist  ;^>

specifics:  6 months ago i bought an HP Pavillion a6600f . . . i love it and have been buying things for it from the start . . . i find it easy to use and **bleep** hard to turn off  ;^>  i'm always checking to make sure i have the latest drivers for everything, cleaning the registry, etc.

i have had exactly *one* problem for the past few months, and it's bugging me enough now to want to do someting about it.

specifics on the system:  the desktop Pavillion a6600f has a Pentium dual-core E2200 processor running at 2.2 GHz . . . i put 4 GB of memory in it, and it is running Vista Home Premium w/Service Pack 1 (64-bit).  the rest probably isn't important to this question.

THE QUESTION:  when i open Health & Security in the hp Advisor, i always have yellow exclamation mark in a triangle under "PC Update" and also a red exclamation mark in a square under "PC Health".  both are caused by the same problem . . . the fact i keep being told there is a new version of "HP Health Check" and i need to download/install it.

problem is, i am unable to do so.  here's what i get.

at first, all seems to go well.  it finds it, downloads it (it's about 13 MB), and i get the message "HP Active support Library is configuring your new software installation".  *THAT'S* where the problems begin.  i get:

"HP Active Support Library error: Error 1316. A network error occured while attempting to read the from the file C:\windows\installer\HP Active Support Library.msi" (note:  i checked and i don't even have that file present in C:\windows\installer . . . is this the problem?)

then i get "Rolling back installation"

and finally, "Error: -1603  Fatal error during installation.  Consult Windows Installer Help (msi.chm) or MSDN for more information"

so i can never update the HP Health Check and i always have those two errors (the yellow triangle and the red square) present in HP TCA - PC Health & Security.

i did a search in these forums and found quite a few issues pertaining to the HP TCA, and i understand some people even turn it off . . . but it's never given me a problem aside from this one, and i'd like to keep it around if i can.

i'm sorry if this post is on the long side, but i wanted to provide as much info as i could.

so my name is Michael King and i hope to be a regular contributor here, and i don' t mind if anyone wants to email me, although i understand problems like this are better publicly posted as they benefit the community as a whole.

thanks,

- MK

Message Edited by Michael_King on 05-16-2009 08:06 PM

[1badGuard]

Check that your firewall is not blocking the installation process. You may disable the protection software for a minute or 2 just for the installation.

Also read: 

 http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?cc=us&docname=c01146190&dlc=en&lc=en&jumpid=reg_R1002_US...

Message Edited by dmhoo29 on 05-16-2009 10:35 PM

[Michael_King]

wow!  thx for replying so fast, my friend.

unfortunately, neither solution worked.  i didn't think the firewall would be an issue, because it does dowload the entire 13MB update and begins installing it after all . . . gets all the way to "HP ACtive Support Library is configuring your new software installation", then it begins going through a series of "validating this", "removing that", "validating that", "removing this" . . . the install time-line gets about 2/3 of the way to the end, when it crashes with the messages i mentioned.

so i didn't think the firewall was an issue, but i did it anyway . . . turned it off completely, both ways.  i also rerferenced the link you gave me.  by the way, the *first* message on the page you gave me to reference is exactly what i get as an error . . . i don't get any error at all concerning "vbscript".  yet the solution at the end of that page seems to concentrate on the vbscript error . . . uneless by doing . . .

regsrv /u vbscript.dll   -and-

regsrv vbscript.dll

. . takes care of BOTH problems, which is what the page seems to imply.

 anyway, dmhoo29, i ran both solutions at the same time . . . no firewall, the command prompt directives, then try installing health check . . . i still get *exactly* the same thing.

but you probably know more than i do to get to a solution . . . have you got another suggestion?  or anyone else?

thx again,

- MK

[anon]

You have Vista, try either independently downloading the update from HP and executing it as administrator, or running the HP advisor as administrator. The installer may have hit on a problem where it can't go further without updating some system file, and can't do that running as a regular user. This is VISTA you are running you know!

[MrFixIt]

Welcome to the support forum. We all try and help each other so here's my input on your problem.

This is a link to the a6600f support page under Vista (64).

Support link - HP DiagTools Update

At the bottom of that page you will find an update for HW DiagTools dated 3-2009 with a size of 21.56MB This should update your HP Advisor to version 2.4.6651.2902 which is the version I'm running on my m9400t with Vista Home Premium (64). There are a couple more updates in the same area that you might need. I hope this helps correct your problem.

If it helps and you are happy a kudo would be appreciated.

[Michael_King · Accepted solution]

first of all, i want to thank the three of you who tried to help me with this problem.  this means you, dmhoo29, anon, and MrFixIt.  and as a gesture of good will, i'd like to give kudos to the three of you, being a new member and all.

you all had great suggestions, and based on those suggestions, i tried a few variations based on those suggestions.  unfortunately, nothing worked . . . it always came back to the same error messages, no matter what i did.

in fact . . . HP's *own* suggestion . . . which is essentially reproduced in this thread . . . doesn't work either.

i had already spent hours on this ridiculous thing, and tonight i've spent 3 hours on it.  i finally solved it, and the solution may benefit other people who i can see may easily run across a similar problem with other upgrades . . . BECAUSE THE PROBLEM IS A RIDICULOUS OVERSIGHT ON THE PART OF HP which we can easily manually correct.

THE SOLUTION

what bugged me from the start was the fact i kept getting the message pertaining to the file "HP Active Support Library.msi", which the installer was looking for in C:\Windows\Installer.  it seemed to me that the real problem was that it was looking for a file which simply wasn't there.

well, during my 3 hours screwing around with this tonight, guess what i found?

there is a subdirectory called "swsetup" right under the root C:\ drive.  and inside C:\swsetup i found the following two subdirectories:

C:\swsetup\sp36082   -and-

C:\swsetup\sp41377

i knew from the many, many times i tried to update HP Health Check that it was downloading sp41377.(can't remember the extension) via HP FTP.  so i checked out what was in C:\swsetup\sp41377 and guess what i found?  well, a few things, but the one thing that concerns us is (drumroll please) THE FILE "HP ACTIVE SUPPORT LIBRARY.MSI" !!!

i simply opened another window, navigated to C:\Windows\Installer, and drag-and-dropped "HP Active Support Library.msi" there (i held down the "Ctrl" key so as to make a copy of it rather than a straight move).

so now i had that annoying file in the right directory.  so, since my C:\swsetup\sp41377 window was still open, and since there was a "setup.exe" file in there, i ran it.

and holy mother of God, it actually worked.

what that means is that what was happening was, when i tried updating Health Check, it would create a subdirectory in C:\swsetup . . . in this case the C:\swsetup\sp41377 subdirectory . . . dump everything it needed for the update in there . . . and then ran "setup.exe" . . .

. . except that whoever at HP wrote "setup.exe" forgot to include one itty-bitty instruction in the code . . .

to copy "HP Active Support Library.msi" into the C:\Windows\Installer subdirectory first.

so watch out for this kind of thing, my friends . . . if you try updating something HP wrote and you're getting a "cannot find such-and-such file in such-and-such directory" type of error msg, see if you can locate it elsewhere on your hard drive . . . maybe in C:\swsetup, maybe elsewhere, i don't know . . . and if you locate it, just manually copy it over to the required directory and run the installer again.  this could be the only time HP commited this exact sin  ;^> . . . or then again it may not!

kudos and thx again to everyone who contributed.

- Michael King

Message Edited by Michael_King on 05-17-2009 11:37 PM

[MrFixIt]

Thanks for the kudo Michael_King not that I deserve it since my recommended fix didn't work. To make up for that I'm giving you a kudo for fixing your own problem. Good work and keep it up.

Regards.

[SueJ]

The other way I easily fixed this problem was to download and install Microsoft's Windows Install Clean-Up utility.  I ran the program, and selected the HP Active Support Library to remove.

After this completed, I ran the HP update program, and it worked smoothly!!