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Installer Fails with "You need at least Windows Installer MSI version 3.1." - CCSv6.0.1 / Win 7 64 bit

Anthony F. Seely
Guru 68820 points

Not really a question but I fought this for a day to avoid having to re-image my PC.   Finally got to the bottom of it.  Wondering if anyone can explain it or if anyone else has seen it.


During the installation of the 'emupack' portion of CCS,  the installer fails with a message 'You need at least Windows Installer MSI version 3.1.'   This actually pops up and disappears quickly if you are no watching it, if you walk away and come back you might just see that the CCS install failed at the emulation pack install step.

But you can see this easily by trying to install a standalone emupack installer.

What drove me a little buggy is that I could run commands like:

'where msiexec'  in cmd.exe and msiexec would be found in C:\Windows\System32

Also typing msiexec would bring it up, and it would report it was version 5.0.xxx.

So it seemed like msiexec was there, but the installer wasn't finding it.


Finally found out that the installer seems to need msiexec from the C:\Windows\SysWOW64 folder.

This was missing on my machine, so I restored it from another working machine and problem solved.

But still not sure why the installer needs the 64-bit version instead of the 32 bit and why the error message isn't more clear.

And the last question is how did this 64-bit version go missing?

Anyway - this is not a question - just wanted to post and see if anyone else has run into this or if someone has a really good understanding of System32 versus SysWOW64.

  • TI__Intellectual 2515 points

    Note that the SysWOW64 folder doesn't contain 64-bit binaries.  It's the "Windows on Windows64" directory to contain the elements needed to run 32-bit binaries on a 64-bit Windows OS.  So that is exactly where the 32-bit version of the msiexec installer needed to be.  When you restored it from another system, you got the 32-bit version of the msiexec installer.  Oddly, 64-bit binaries on a 64-bit Windows go in System32.

    Meanwhile, I've updated the emupack installer to make the error message a bit clearer.  If the problem is that it can't find the installer, then there is a message that it cannot find the file instead of talking about the version number.