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Arrrrgh -- "setup.exe is not a valid Win32 application"

I

imported_trajan

Member
I know this is forum is more about hardware than software, but when I built my computer everyone here was incredibly helpful and brilliant, so I'm giving it a shot!

I recently tried to reinstall my copy of Supreme Commander off the DVD and got the error "Setup.exe is not a valid Win32 application". Confused, I tried a few different things and discovered that other game installation CDs I have give me the same error when I try to run the install.

What have I done?? I can think of only two major things I may have done to mess up my computer:

(1) In an effort to isolate the cause of a crash problem I've been having with a particular program, I've been using msconfig and booting with a selective start up. I do Run -> msconfig, then unclick the boxes for SYSTEM.INI, WIN.INI and Load Startup Items. I've also been deactivating all non-microsoft processes in the Services tab.
--> I went back and reactivated all these processes / checked all the boxes, and restated. That didn't fix my problem.

(2) Right before I observed the problem, I, um. **guilty look** editted my registry. Just a tiny bit. I used RegEdit and deleted three folders of keys, all of which were directly related to Supreme Commander (I wanted to do an extremely clean reinstall). I am 99.999% certain that the only keys I deleted were contained within SupCom related groups (e.g. GPG, THQ, Supreme Commander).


I've searched the web and there are LOADS of people complaining of this problem for all sorts of different games and applications but I couldn't find a solution anywhere that matched my situation, where the DVD I am using is totally fine (I tried it on another computer and it worked fine) and setup.exe appears not to be working for *any* install CD that I have.

Please please please if you have any ideas, let me know, and thanks in advance for your help!!
 
I've had a similar problem twice ... the first time it was caused by an anti-piracy software program installed by several games called Starforce which for some reason interfered with installing anything off of a DVD & the second time I was running an emulater program called Any-DVD which was conflicting with my FEAR installation.

Of course you may have easily screwed somthing up by editing the registry too ... try a system-restore & hopefully it will fix you up if thats the problem.
 
Definitely follow Capante's advice.

Then, for the future, instead of mucking around in TaskManger and the Registry, try using Startup Control Panel

Just d/l it and double-click it. You won't see an installation, but it will install itself in your Control Panel as Startup. It's a breeze to use, easy to change back any changes you made and safe to use.

 
Thanks for all the tips!

I ran a restore point (luckily from the same afternoon, but before I meddled) and that didn't end up working. I was reading in other forums and a lot of people were suggesting that this sort of problem can be caused by problems with the DVD drive. This seemed improbable in my case, since it had been working fine just a few days before (and still seems to *work*) but just to be sure I plugged in an external and tried again. It worked!

So, evidentally something IS wrong with my DVD drive. Maybe the lens is just dirty? Or a cable is loose? I'll check the cables and try again, otherwise I might have to go invest in a lens cleaning CD.... :/

Thanks again for all the suggestions!
 
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