Hello all,

Some of you MAY recall especially Broni! my problem with updating to the current version of java. I keep getting the error message"completion of update to java platform not complete" Well long story short, after a great effort from many here in the forum the only solution was to do a reinstall of XP. Well the stubborn side of me kept researching and came up with this..................does it MAKE sense to give it a try?? if so how do I go about renaming?


It's fixed! After doing a lot of digging and research, I discovered that Sun went to a MSI install system. Which is how MS wants everyone to install applications INTO Windows. The conversion from an installer package to an MSI install occurred around version 8.

I found that I could NOT install ANY MSI file. OK, so I go get the MSI Installer program, from MS, and re-install, right? NOPE? The MSI installer program, from MS, runs and promptly says it's already installed! Oops!

There was no way to remove the old program, and there was no way to install it, like a new install. There are NO command line switches, to override the installation. SEEMED like a dead end, to me.

After searching the Sun and MS sites for a long time, and NOT finding anything along these lines I was about ready to give up and do a "WIPE and re-install". FINALLY, my brain kicked in and remembered an old trick from long ago.

I just renamed the MSI installer program (MSIEXEC.EXE) to and ".old" file extension and it worked, i.e. I re-ran the MSI installer program, this time it worked just fine. I then installed the latest JRE and everything is fine now.

Now, what corrupted my install for the MSIEXEC.EXE program? Your guess is as good as mine. But, after reading more than 2,000+ message entries on, both the SUN and MS sites, with not one reference to this problem or anything similar! I've come to the conclusion that MS isn't as knowledgeable as they'd like us to think. About their own programs.

If such a simple solution, referencing what I did to correct the issue, was known to MS, you'd have thought that they would have published such a solution by now. The "trick" of renaming a file has been around since the start of computing. Which, to be honest, means that I'm getting slower in my old age.
I appreciate your post Thanks!