Exchange 2007 LoadGen installation issues

I have had a few hours frustration and an eventual work around to installing the Exchange 2007 Load Generator in one of my test environments.

I have been trying to install the Exchange 2007 Load Generator (LoadGen.msi) on a range of servers with the same installation error occurring each time. The errors occured when installing both the 64-bit package on some Windows 2008, 64-bit servers and also the 32-bit package on some Windows 2003 R2 SP2, 32-bit servers. Here are the range of errors and diagnosis:

The Microsoft Exchange Load Generator installer gives the following error message:

There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A program run as part of the setup did not finish as expected. Contact you support personnel or package vendor.

The server's application event log gives the following error message:

Event ID: 11722 Source: MsiInstaller
Product: Microsoft Exchange Load Generator -- Error 1722. There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A program run as part of the setup did not finish as expected. Contact your support personnel or package vendor. Action START_REMOTE_SERVICE.B08E90EE_3FC7_4509_A7F3_DE16BC275F17, location: net.exe, command: START LoadGenRemote

If I run the MSI with verbose logging (msiexec /i LoadGen.msi /l*v C:\LoadGen.txt) I get the following error in the verbose log file.

Generator\LoadGenRemoteSvc.exe", ServiceType=16,StartType=2,ErrorControl=0,,,,StartName=LocalSystem,Password=**********, Description=Enables distributed load generation for the Microsoft Exchange Load Generator tool.)
Error 1722. There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A program run as part of the setup did not finish as expected. Contact your support personnel or package vendor. Action START_REMOTE_SERVICE.B08E90EE_3FC7_4509_A7F3_DE16BC275F17, location: net.exe, command: START LoadGenRemote


When you click OK to the installer error message it of course rolls back all actions in the MSI. The last error message pointed me in the direction of it being a service problem. If you do not click OK and look in the Services.msc you will see there is a service called Microsoft Exchange Load Generator Remote Agent. This service is configured as Automatic, but is unable to startup using the Local System account credentials. If you give it another account (I used an admin account in my test lab) it does start. Of course this is useless as the installer has already failed and the only option is to click OK and roll back the install.

As an absolute pot luck guess, before beginning to think about attempting to edit the MSI the following action allowed the installation to complete. The answer is.....

Disable the network card during the MSI installation!

Yep - for some completely unknown (to me) reason, this allows the installation to complete and the service to run as the Local System account.

Proxycfg.exe

I originally came across Proxycfg.exe after installing one of the Exchange 2007 Update Rollup packs. Some of the Exchange 2007 services would not start up, in particular the Microsoft Exchange Service Host service.

I have now came across the exact same issue with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and the SQL Server Integration Services service also.

This problem occurs because the server cannot reach the following Microsoft Web site: http://crl.microsoft.com/pki/crl/products/CSPCA.crl .For some reason these services do not know how to access the Internet if the server is configured to use a Proxy server.
There are various solutions for each individual service that cannot start that involve installing (many) updates to stop these services attempting to reach this site. Alternatively the easiest way to solve this is configure the server services to use the logged on users proxy configuration. To do this open a CMD prompt and change the directory to C:\Windows\System32 and run the command proxycfg.exe -u. In my case the services affected by this problem then all started immediately.