Installer failure: NIPathsDir property NISHAREDDIR is undefined

[Ian.W]

I have another installer problem. The user gets

"Fatal Error!! Required NIPathsDir property NISHAREDDIR is undefined" 

when installing within Windows 7 Ultimate within Parallels (!).

I have posted the file install_log_ian64.txt on the incoming FTP server. Froom what I can see there is a NISHAREDDIR64 defined but no NISHAREDDIR. Is this a 64 vs 32 bit bug in the installer, or a quirk within Parallels?

Thanks,

Ian

[LuisG · Accepted solution]

Hi Ian,

It looks as if your user has run into a form of this issue. In his or her case, there are several Windows locations (probably My Pictures, My Documents, etc...) pointing to an inaccessible network location: \\.psf\home\*

This is a limitation of many Windows installers which need to validate all the system paths at installation time. Hopefully your user can make that network location accessible or, if not, change the system paths to point to something else by editing them in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders.

Luis

[Ian.W]

Thank you Luis.

Indeed Parallels does strange things (\\.psf\home\....) with those locations. Incidentally, the user was very happy with the boost in performance given by pointing "My Documents" etc to the virtual machine rather than the host system.

--Ian