The Top 5 Applications Issues Facing Enterprise IT and How to Solve Them

Addressing the Top 5 Application Issues

Our team is constantly researching how to simplify the mobilization and management of applications across modern Windows desktop and multi-cloud environments, which led us to uncover and address the top five application issues facing enterprise IT teams. If you’re here, it means you’re likely trying to solve one of the following application issues:

• Windows Installer Error 1603
• Windows Installer Error 1618
• Windows Installer Error 1708 or 2753
• The Feature You Are Trying to Use Is on a Network Resources That Is Unavailable
• Application Has Stopped Working or a Program Has Encountered a Problem

So, what can you do about them? The short version, download our whitepaper The Top 5 Application Issues Facing Enterprise IT Teams and How to Solve Them. The paper outlines what the issue is, how to eliminate these issues through traditional approaches (if possible), and how to proactively eliminate these issues (and all other application issues) using Cloudpaging application containers.

Download the Whitepaper

Breaking Down the Top 5 Application Issues Facing Enterprise IT

Due to the siloed nature of most enterprises, who often divide their IT teams logically by roles and responsibilities (each with their own teams and tiers of support), identifying and remediating application issues can be difficult. Below are the top 5 applications issues facing enterprise IT teams and the common drivers behind them.

Windows Installer Error 1603

This error is somewhat of a catch-all for many MSI install-related issues. A common error message is “Fatal error during installation”. Other times the message is different, making this error more difficult for troubleshoot.

Common drivers behind 1603 errors include:

• an application installer is running with inadequate permissions
• an incomplete installation is detected or conflicts with other installed software

Again, this error encompasses many types of Windows Installer issues. This is one of the main drivers behind the frequency of the error message and why it is one of the most searched Windows Installer error codes.

Windows Installer Error 1618

Similar to Windows Installer Error 1603, Windows Installer Error 1618 also has inconsistent error messages. Most of the time, the installation error states the Installation was interrupted or another installation is already in progress.

As you may expect, this error can occur when an installation is attempted but another installation is already in progress. You may be thinking, “a quick way to successfully install an application encountering this error would be to kill the active msiexec.exe process that is already running”.

Do NOT do that.

You should allow the process to complete. If there is a hanging process, you may end up waiting a long time only to discover the process never completes. If this occurs, you are stuck in limbo where you can’t complete other installations on that machine.

Windows Installer Error 1708 or 2753

These errors can occur when installations crash and become corrupted. Fortunately, Windows Installer is relatively robust. Unlike the prior errors we’ve discussed, this one is a bit more direct. With that comes good news and bad news.

• The Good: Windows Installer has a graceful rollback feature for administrators to utilize when this error does occur.

• The Bad: The rollback feature can have a devastating impact on end user desktops if the installation process completely crashes before a rollback is completed.

Usually, if an installation encounters a problem the Windows Installer has the intelligence to gracefully roll back the install to avoid leaving partially installed applications on a machine. However, there are instances where a crash occurs and a rollback is not possible. This is when a corruption can occur, which is a story for another day.

The Feature You Are Trying to Use Is on a Network Resources That Is Unavailable

The Active Setup feature in Windows installers has been the bane of many desktop administrators’ existence. If an application requires to install application components into a directory specific to a single user, administrators and vendors alike may turn to Active Setup. Active Setup will install the user-specific components for other users when they log into any machine the application is installed on.

This should only occur the first time the users login to that machine, as long as the machine is persistent or user profiles are being roamed and/or a profile management solution is in use.

There are several problems with this feature. One is that it slows down logins for a new user as those Windows installers need to innumerate and run to set those user-specific settings. In environments where machines are reimaged often, the slowness may also be experienced more regularly. If a user’s profile is cleared by the Service Desk, users will also experience this slowness again each time this happens.

Application Has Stopped Working or a Program Has Encountered a Problem

This error is usually encountered during application runtime and occasionally when an application is initially launching. This error can be caused by various issues. The most common being application conflicts and corruption.

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