I know some people here have experience with Windows installers, so I thought I'd ask.

I have an application that I need to install on my Windows computer that refuses to install. It does install on another Windows computer. It is a distributed as an MSI.

It goes through the whole install process and claims that it installs properly, and then tries to start the application and fails saying it can't find the executable. The location where it gets installed on the computer where it works doesn't get created. Tracing the process with Process Monitor doesn't seem to show anything trying to access that directory at all.

What sort of further troubleshooting steps can I take?

Check to see if it's a security problem on the faulty computer. For instance, a Program Files folder where you don't have permission to create directories.

Try creating the destination directory yourself, and set its permissions to "everyone: Full access" and see if that allows the installer to continue. There's a chance that it might put the EXE there but the program still won't work because of a problem with system files, but who knows.

If all else fails, reverse-engineer the installed files on the good computer and hand-copy them to the bad computer.

Forgot to mention that I already checked security issues and created the directory myself. Neither of those things helped.

I finally ran the installer as a different user via "runas" and that worked. (Both users were in the local Administrators group.)

No idea why that did it.

Was one a local machine user and the other a domain user?

I'm betting there's something different about the permissions for those two users. Even when you drop two users into the Administrators group, if one of them is a domain user, it inherits a bunch of permissions, some of which might still bork the installer.

A smart installer program would have checked for those things, before starting. A less smart installer program would have gone ahead and tried to install, but checked the return codes for all of the functions it called and put up an error when the functions didn't succeed. The least smart kind of installer would have done none of the above, clearly that's what you got.

Yes, that is the case.

The "effective permissions" for both users on the folders were the same: Full Control, plus everything else listed.