1722 Error from InstallShield

Last week I found a post in the Vista newsgroups from a lady who was having problems installing Kaspersky Anti-Virus. She was getting an error 1722 upon installation on one computer out of three and the installation failed. She had called both Kaspersky and here computer manufacturer (HP) and neither could help. HP told her to get a new anti-virus package, and Kaspersky had no help to give.

Searching a little I found a solution on a site called MyDigitalLife.com, but it was a bit complicated getting at it, and it came in the form of some registry files with no real information on what the problem is. Therefore, I thought I would explain the problem here and give a solution that worked at least for this lady.

1722 is an error from Install Shield, a third-party installation technology. It means that some custom action failed during installation. Usually custom actions are used to run external software, such as regsvr32.exe to register something.

The thread on MyDigitalLife indicates that this has to do with a corrupted registry entry. It basically shows that, for some reason, the path in the registry to where the device driver information files are located has been corrupted. Thus, your first step in trouble-shooting should be to validate that path:

  1. Elevate a command prompt by right-clicking the Command Prompt in Start:All Programs:Accessories and selecting Run as administrator...
  2. From the command prompt, run regedit.exe
  3. If you have a 32-bit system, navigate to
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion.
    If you have a 64-bit system, navigate to
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
  4. Set the "DevicePath" value to "%SystemRoot%\Inf" (without the quotes).

If this does not help there could be other things wrong, but at least this seems to have helped several people.

Published 10 March 2008 09:47 AM by jesper
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Comments

# Larry Seltzer said on 10 March, 2008 12:27 PM

Pretty lame of the Kaspersky people not to know this.

# Stefan Krueger said on 11 March, 2008 06:11 AM

Some additional information and clarification for users getting error 1722:

Error 1722 is coming from the Windows Installer engine, which is part of the Windows operating system. Tools like InstallShield (and several others) create .msi packages that are installed using the Windows Installer eingine. So this error is not specific to InstallShield and could happen with msi files created with other tools, too.

Error 1722 is quite generic, it basically says that "something went wrong" with a custom action. Ususally the error message should include additional information, like the name of the custom action. If this information is not displayed on the error dialog, it should still be written to the event log. Also, you can generate a log file of the install, see www.msifaq.com/.../1022.htm for instructions.

The problem is that a user typically won't know what this custom action is trying to do (sometimes you can guess from its name) and why it failed. And there could be any reason for failure, so the solution described in this article is very specific to the Kaspersky setup package. In general, your best bet is to contact the manufacturer with the error information - and hope they are more helpful than Kaspersky was in this case.

--

Stefan Krueger

Microsoft MVP for Setup & Deployment / Windows Installer

# jesper said on 11 March, 2008 10:36 AM

Thanks Stefan. Good clarification. Unfortunately, as in the Kaspersky example, the vendor does not always come across particularly helpful.

# Stopher said on 06 April, 2008 10:31 PM

Tried this fix.  No dice.  Other options??  Hotfix from Microsoft?

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