Installation of Parallel Studio XE Composer Edition c++ 2015 fails on clean Windows 8.1 system

[BURGI]

Hello,

I have problems installing the Parallel Studio XE 2015 Composer Edition for C++.
The installation ends immediately after displaying the setup splash screen for about 1 second, also after a clean Windows 8.1 installation.
The last lines in the log files are always the same:
...
[t13b4 2015.03.23 10.56.01 0000003f] [message_processor]: INFO: Registered: zip (0.0.0.0)
[t13b4 2015.03.23 10.56.01 00000040] [message_processor]: INFO: Registered: zip script (0.0.0.0)
[t13b4 2015.03.23 10.56.01 00000041] [message_processor]: CRITICAL: Failed to load plugin: action
[t13b4 2015.03.23 10.56.01 00000042] [message_processor]: CRITICAL: Failed to load plugin: cache
[t13b4 2015.03.23 10.56.01 00000043] [message_processor]: CRITICAL: Failed to load plugin: catalog
[t13b4 2015.03.23 10.56.01 00000044] [message_processor]: CRITICAL: Failed to load plugin: sizer
[t13b4 2015.03.23 10.56.01 00000045] [message_processor]: CRITICAL: Failed to load plugin: system/string list
-END OF LOG-

I'm logged in as an admin. Visual Studio 2010 was previously setup and tested, including Service Pack 1.
I have tried this installation on three different machines (DELL T5500, T7610, 2x Windows 8.1 Enterprise, 1x Windows 7 Prof., all within one domain), same problem.

An installation of Intel Math Kernel Library 11.1.4 (Composer XE 2013 SP 1 Update 4) was successful without any problems, so it might be a problem within the installer of the 2015 Edition.

Any suggestions?

Best regards
Ralf

[Bernard]

Are there additional more verbatim error messages?

Can you install Process Explorer and monitor Parallel Studio setup?

[Bernard]

You should see the last active TID(thread ID) and top stack function where some processing is done. It will not solve the issue, but it can be helpful in localization of the failing thread/function.

[BURGI]

the splash screen of the Setup program is just visible for about one second and I can shortly see the progress indicator.

I've installed the Process Explorer and started the setup.exe as an admin, but due to the short run time of the process I'm not able to check anything with the Process Explorer.

There are no visible error messages and there is no entry in one of the event logs.

I will attach the full installation log, but I found no usable information within.

Best regards,

Ralf

[Bernard]

There is also possibility to run ProcDump tool on failed installation , but this is the beggining of windows installer debugging which is scarcely documented. I was thinking about the possibility of some weird registry related error. I would advise you to run Process Monitor in order to record registry events related to Parallel Studio installation.

http://superuser.com/questions/677422/process-monitor-capture-filter-or-scripting

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2007/06/01/troubleshooting-with-process-monitor.aspx

[Hubert_H_Intel]

Hi Ralf,

Was the same Visual Studio 2010 (including Service Pack 1) installed on ALL machines you've tried to install? Do you have a chance to try out installation on a different machine with another Visual Studio version?

Regards, Hubert.

[Bernard]

@Ralf

Did you try to run Process Monitor?

[TimP]

I've run into situations where I had to remove all XE2015 software tools installations (including use of "Special Uninstaller" for win8.1 or msicuu2 for win7, if the built-in removal didn't work) prior to installing parallel studio.  The installation doesn't play well with older installations of some individual components (particularly VTune), besides not self-correcting a broken installation.

Force removal of a prior installation can result in the installer taking a long time with updating the Visual Studio integrations. 

I'm not sure that re-installing Windows (without reformatting the disc) necessarily cleans up old Intel tools installations; with Windows 10 specifically my experience is the opposite.   Remnants of older Intel tools installations seemed to be implicated in some cases where I had to fall back to a previous saved win8.1 as well, followed by cleaning up Intel tools.

Parallel Studio failure log may or may not mention a prior tools component which it saw and didn't know how to deal with.

[BURGI · Accepted solution]

@all:
After checking all the files within the plugin-directory of the Intel setup files, I found the problem:

All of the plugin files that failed loading (action.micl, cache.micl., catalog.micl etc.) had a problem with the so called "CounterSignature" which was found to be invalid.

The countersignature is named "Starfield Servives Timestamp Authority" and it's root certificate ("Starfield Services Root Certificate Authority") was not installed on the systems, only the "Starfield Services Root Certificate Authority - G2".
So after a manual import of this root certificate (sfsroot.crt from https://certs.secureserver.net/repository) the installation succeeded.

So thanks to all for your suggestions and best regards

Ralf
 

[Bernard]

Glad that you have found the root cause of your problem.