@edarchitect said:
I have a similar problem. SketchUp 7 has been crashing on the first load of the day. It seems to work fine on the second and subsequent loads. It also occasionally crashes with the Ctrl key down. So I went to "Add and Remove Programs" to do a repair. The repair process stopped when it couldn't find googlesketchup7.msi. I searched my computer and couldn't find that file anywhere. Can you tell me where to find it?
I didn't want this topic to die forever without any workable solutions, so here's an update. I'm writing it specifically to address the quoted issue, but the general logic probably applies in a wide variety of situations.
On Windows, the installer for Google SketchUp uses the Windows Installer technology. That's the case any time you see an MSI file. Ours is wrapped by a self-extracting EXE to make it smaller, but it's an MSI under the hood. An MSI is simply a specially created database file that is processed by Windows Installer in order to perform orderly software installations.
Any time Windows Installer performs an installation, it saves an incredible amount of information in the registry and its internal database, possibly up to and including the entire original MSI file. It does this in order to provide a mechanism for performing reliable uninstallations, repair installations, or upgrade installations. That data is put into a special repository that is referenced later when those operations are selected. This is normally totally hidden from the end user.
In fact, the way our installer is structured, if you're performing an upgrade, it actually upgrades all of the files and then uses the MSI database to uninstall all files that were put down by the previous installation but are no longer needed for the upgrade version. In this way, it actually performs an uninstall operation during an upgrade, without you even noticing. It's pretty slick when it works.
Here's the problem. If the Windows Installer database becomes corrupted, it is possible for the critical data to get lost, causing all sorts of problems down the road when repair, uninstall, or upgrade is attempted. Registry cleaners are also frequently culprits for messing up the Windows Installer information for programs. In some cases, the original MSI data that was saved during installation is deleted, or the registry keys that hold links to that data are deleted, so Windows Installer doesn't have access to it anymore. Then, when you try one of the operations I mentioned before, Windows Installer gets confused. Although it wants to continue, it can't until it's given access to the original MSI that contains all of the critical installer information. Windows Installer assumes the MSI may just be on a network drive that's no longer accessible, so it displays the dialog as mentioned. Although you may be able to work yourself out of the problem by actually finding the original MSI and providing Windows Installer with the path, that's a difficult and error-prone process.
Instead, in such a situation, it is probably best to perform an uninstallation of the broken product.
The first way to do this is from the Add/Remove Programs menu. If you can uninstall from there, great! Just do an uninstallation and then install the new product.
As mentioned in the quoted issue, sometimes that option is unavailable (which again, is caused by Windows Installer database corruption or missing registry keys). In that case, it may be possible to use the original installer for the broken product to perform the uninstallation. You would literally re-run the installer for the original program you installed and choose "uninstall" instead of "modify" or "repair". For instance, if SU 7.0 M1 is broken and you're trying to upgrade to 7.1 when you discover it, then you would want to try re-running the installer for 7.0 M1, at which point you may be prompted to uninstall or repair the installation. Since you're running from the original installer, the Windows Installer database should have access to everything it needs and be able to uninstall or repair cleanly. After that, you could then run the SU 7.1 installer without any problems.
If the previous suggestions don't work or are not workable solutions for you, there's another choice. I have never used this program, but Microsoft recommends it in many situations and I found that companies such as HP and Adobe also recommend this for repairs.
Microsoft has created a Windows Installer cleanup utility:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301
Clearly, we can't take responsibility for anything you try to do with this. However, in situations where the SketchUp installation is broken (or any other MSI-based installation, for that matter), you may be able to use this utility to uninstall all previous records for SketchUp, after which you should be able to run the SketchUp installer again and see that everything installs as expected. Although it should leave your preferences in place, there's a chance that those could get messed up. You'd also be subject to losing plugin installations, etc., requiring some work to re-install those items. But, if you're in a bind and there are no other options, this might be a life-saver to get you working again.
It is important to stress that errors like this are not due to a deficiency in the SketchUp installer, but are caused by corruption in the Windows Installer database or in the registry, sometimes due to other programs' installers, registry cleaners, or other out-of-the-ordinary circumstances.
This won't be of any help to those who have reported the problem before, but I hope it will be of use in the future.