I’ve had to install Adobe Reader 8 on a few Vista machines and always run into an issue. After downloading AdbeRdr80_en_US.exe from adobe.com and running it, you get a dialog asking you to confirm that you really want to run it. If you allow it to run, it’ll expand the files correctly and then launch the actual Setup.exe file to install the app itself. Unfortunately, running it may result in either of the following errors:

1 - "The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed. This can occur if the Windows Installer is not installed correctly. Contact your support personnel for assistance."

or

2 - An error regarding the temp directory being inaccesible, out of space, or other unlikely problem.

To get around this, run the AdbeRdr80_en_US.exe app and wait for it to finish expanding the installer files. You’ll know it’s done when you see the Setup.exe dialog:

Leave the dialog alone for now. Instead, navigate to “C:\Users\[user name]\AppData\LocalLow\Netopsystems\temp\Adobe Reader 8.0” and run AcroRead.msi directly. It should allow you to install everything fine. Afterwards, you can hit cancel or whatever to dismiss the original dialog. Note that when you dismiss the dialog (whether to cancel or run to failure or success) it’ll remove the files in the temp directory.

Hope this helps.
2/5/2007 1:01:43 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [3]