Incredibly irritating error when you go to install under your user account when you’re using mapped drives for your documents. All our domain users have a userfolder on the server, it’s mapped as z:\ and there is a folder redirection set up. It’s pretty standard in a corporate/domain environment, so why does it cause so many Vista installations to fail?
This is something I’ve run into time and time again and There are a couple of things you can try…sometimes they work individually, sometimes not!
- Reset your “My Pictures” location to the default (yes, that is stupid; no, I don’t know why Unrelated Program X wants to install something into “My Pictures”).
- Edit your registry (BACK IT UP FIRST) to remove references to your mapped drive.
- Run Regedit.
- Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders
- Change any references that use the drive letter to use the %USERPROFILE% variable.
- Restart.
- If you’re using UAC (User Account Control) you might need to map the network drive as the administrator. This is a pain in the @$$ because you have to disconnect the drive under your user account first. Of course, if you’ve got ANY documents open, this will upset your profile. Anyway, steps for that:
- Disconnect the currently mapped drive.
- Open the command prompt as the administrator. Type "net use \\[server]\share and check that it’s mapped by typing “net use”.
- Open explorer and navigate to your shared folder and right click, use the “Map Network Drive” wizard to map the share under your user profile.
- If all above fails (as in my case), your only option is to log in as a user that doesn’t map drives (machine local admin works for me, but then you have to enable that user as it’s disabled by default. You also have to provide a password for it – don’t forget to disable again after an install.)
I could rant about how rubbish this is, but to be honest I am to hacked off at wasting my afternoon trying to work around this.
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