A solution to a failing .NET Framework 3.0 installation
The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 redistributable has been failing to deploy through Windows Update (with the error code 0x643) on my work Windows XP machine for quite some time now and I was just not bothered enough by it to find out exactly why. I had tried all workarounds as suggested on the MSDN forums as well as using the pre-release uninstall utility recommended by the release notes to no avail. So I decided to take a deeper look and downloaded the redistributable manually and analysed the output.
First thing I noticed was that the file %TEMP%\dd_dotnetfx3error.txt contained the following error message:
Windows Presentation Foundation: [2] Error: Installation failed for component Windows Presentation Foundation. MSI returned error code 1603
Upon further hunting I found the %TEMP%\dd_wpf_*.txt files and they all contained the same error message:
Product: Windows Presentation Foundation -- Error 1402. Could not open key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\.xps\PersistentHandler. System error 5. Verify that you have sufficient access to that key, or contact your support personnel.
So obviously I had some XPS file viewer installed that wasn't detected by the pre-release uninstall utility. And yes there it was, Microsoft XML Paper Specification Essentials Pack 1.0.5714 was installed. I believe it was actually beta 2 of the product and not version 1.0. Removing it solved the installation problem and the .NET Framework 3.0 installed perfectly.