LabVIEW SCCM deployment fails with "Required MSI directory property PersonalFolder is invalid..."

[charlesrc19]

Hi there!

I have been working on making an SCCM deployment of LabVIEW for our physics department. We have an academic site license and want to use LabVIEW in several computer labs for engineering students. I keep hitting the same error, and frankly I have no idea what to do.

The SCCM deployment I have created runs as the SYSTEM user account. It is silent and uses a custom response file [file attached]. (The installer must run as an administrative user, or the installer will not launch.) With this setup, the installer will run, but it will get stopped by a couple of these annoying warning messages. [image attached] I have tried adjusting the %userprofile% variable for SYSTEM in the registry, but to no avail. What other suggestions do you have? Is there anything I can do? Possibly modify an MSI?

Thanks for your help!

LabVIEW product version: 17.0.0.209

Packages selected: all, except anything 32-bit, FPGA module, Xilinx - ISE, Xilinx Vivado 2014, and Design Suite 2.0

OS: Windows 10 64-bit, most up-to-date version

[JouniAlkio]

Have you got any new information about this?

We have the same problem. I just tested with the fresh Fall 2017 media. I also noticed this bug with Spring 2017 media (which we did not deploy). No problem with Fall 2016 media or older with similar set of components.

This is a pretty big issue because MS ConfigMgr is the most widely used product for software deployment, and it does use the Local System account for installations (unless you build a very cumbersome legacy package/program type of installation which needs to be avoided).

These are our chosen components:

LabVIEW 2017 SP1 (32-bit) (English)  [1524 MB]

VI Package Manager  [271 MB]

LabVIEW 2017 Control Design and Simulation Module  [592 MB]

LabVIEW 2017 Datalogging and Supervisory Control Module  [908 MB]

LabVIEW 2017 MathScript RT Module  [448 MB]

LabVIEW 2017 Desktop Execution Trace Toolkit (32-bit and 64-bit)  [372 MB]

LabVIEW 2017 VI Analyzer Toolkit  [179 MB]

LabVIEW 2017 Unit Test Framework Toolkit  [196 MB]

LabVIEW 2017 Real-Time Module (English)  [1101 MB]

NI SignalExpress 2015  [1074 MB]

LabVIEW Modulation Toolkit 17.0  [623 MB]

LabVIEW Spectral Measurements Toolkit 16.0  [411 MB]

LabVIEW 2017 Advanced Signal Processing Toolkit  [326 MB]

LabVIEW 2017 DataFinder Toolkit  [276 MB]

DIAdem 2017 SP1 (32-bit) (English)  [877 MB]

Measurement Studio 2015 Enterprise Edition for Visual Studio 2013  [825 MB]

NI General Security Patch Q2 2013  [69 MB]

Digital Waveform Editor 3.0.1  [204 MB]

NI-DAQmx 17.5.0  [2102 MB]

NI-488.2 17.0  [712 MB]

NI-Serial 17.5  [537 MB]

NI-VISA 17.5  [785 MB]

NI System Configuration 17.5  [491 MB]

[charlesrc19]

Yes, I did find a workaround to this problem based on the fact that we use ConfigMgr for imaging machines.

In our implementation, we image all machines coming in to our organization with Windows 10 and immediately afterward install some basic software onto the machine with an account called IMAGING, which is automatically created. To avoid the PersonalFolder error, I manually changed the registry key pointing to the SYSTEM personal folder to point to the IMAGING personal folder.

I used the following batch commands to change the personal folder:

reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\S-1-5-18" /v ProfileImagePath /t REG_EXPAND_SZ /d %systemdrive%\Users\IMAGING /f
set UserProfile=%systemdrive%\Users\IMAGING

Afterwards, I used these commands to switch it back:

set UserProfile=%systemroot%\system32\config\systemprofile
reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\S-1-5-18" /v ProfileImagePath /t REG_EXPAND_SZ /d %systemroot%\system32\config\systemprofile /f

As far as I can tell, there are no side-effects to installing the software this way. The program launches normally and works fine. However, it might not work for your implimentation. I am disappointed in National Instruments for designing their installer this way. They should realize that a large portion of their users would want to use ConfigMgr to deploy their software.

[JouniAlkio]

Thank you for replying. In fact I ended up with a bit different workaround yesterday. I did it with this registry value:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\Personal

changed it to this before installation:

C:\Windows\Temp

after installation back to normal:

%USERPROFILE%\Documents

Doing this inside my installation script it goes through ok with the Local System account.

I tried to pinpoint the exact component where the error occurs, but I couldn't easily find the error from LabVIEW installation logs, which are created at:

C:\ProgramData\National Instruments\Installation Logs

It seems to happen sometime between these separate logs are created in our setup because the former is the last one created before the error:

2059983256 - NI General Security Patch Q2 2013 (KB 67L8K7QW).xml

2059983342 - NI-DAQmx 17.5.xml

It is probably not in the former item though, because that is also included in our previous Fall 2016 setup and this error does not come up there.

- Jouni