Comments on: Error with Microsoft Silverlight Update

By: Juan Carlos Gonzalez

Juan Carlos Gonzalez — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:55:46 +0000

Hi, I has the same problem with Silverlight (I can’t install this), and nothing works for me.

Thanks to you I found the solution…

1) Download Silverlight 3 from Microsoft web (is not a .exe, is a Self Extracting Application…)

2) Uninstall previous versions of Silverlight (I don’t known if necessary use the Windows Install Clean Up (I use them)).

3) Use WinRar and extract the “Silverlight 3″ file in another folder.

4) Open these folder and you’ll find a “silverlight” WinRar file. Extract this file in another folder .

5) Open these folder and you’ll find a .msp file named “Silverlight”. Open these y you probably see the reason of the problem. In my case was a problem of permissions of keys in the registry (HKLM\Software\Microsoft… sorry I don’t remember more), I change the permissions of these keys and the problem was solved.

Cheers =)

By: admin

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:33:59 +0000

Have you tried uninstalling silverlight, then reinstalling it. That is usually the best thing to do first.

Also you can try other browsers as well. Firefox tends to work fine while IE throws that error in many cases.

By: Hilario Duenow

Hilario Duenow — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 03:12:22 +0000

Hey, I found this blog post while searching for help with fixing Microsoft Silverlight. I have recently switched browsers from Safari to IE. Now I seem to have a problem with loading websites that have Microsoft Silverlight. Everytime I go on a site that requires Microsoft Silverlight, my browser freezes and I get a “npctrl.dll” error. I can’t seem to find out how to fix the problem. Any help getting Microsoft Silverlight to work is greatly appreciated! Thanks

By: admin

admin — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 03:33:37 +0000

Well this was originally posted to help with silverlight 1 upgrade and doesn’t seem to help with a failed silverlight 3 upgrade. The manual cleanup sadly is probably the best approach if the cleanup utility is not doing the trick for you. Just make sure you backup your registry before you edit it.

By: admin

admin — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 03:11:48 +0000

Ouch, I should probably have mentioned that you should always backup your registry before modifying it…

Sorry I do not know what any of the silverlight default registry keys are on Windows 7. Hopefully someone can post those up for you. I will also try to check the Windows 7 beta i have for you.

By: Gary Maness

Gary Maness — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 02:44:53 +0000

I did a dumb thing. I not only removed every folder related to Silverlight, but I went through the registry and deleted every key and subkey that had only silverlight related entries in it, including the HKCR entries. Now whenever I try to install ANY version of Silverlight, I get an error 1603. That doesn’t help because I think I removed entries that came with the OS to enable Win 7 to use silverlight at all. I checked the silverlight0.log and the silverlightmsi.log but I could not determine exactly what the problem was. Is there a document somewhere that has the correct default registry keys that have to be present before you start the installation?

By: Ronald Knecht

Ronald Knecht — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 13:47:46 +0000

Thanks for all these tips, however, it did not solve the issue on my machine.

I did install the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility, but it doesn’t show the silverlight ver 2.0.40115.0 that actually is installed on my Win XP sp3 machine (which has all the latest windows updates successfully installed).

Being more than tired doing all this research I would now do a “hard” deinstallation thus deleting the directory and do a manual registry cleanup (very similar to Lisas approach), unless you would come up with yet another hint ;-) TIA.

Regards, Ron

By: Lisa

Lisa — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 20:05:45 +0000

Just wanted to say the info on this website was helpful, at least more than anything I found on any of Microsoft’s so-called “Troubleshooting” pages. I just started having trouble with the silverlight update downloaded by windows Update, and I got sick of seeing it always there, and always failing, so I decided to fix it–on one forum I saw, someone was getting ready to go get the sledgehammer…sounded good to me!

Anyway, I downloaded and run the cleanup utility. Had a little trouble with regedit–I usually try to stay away from that stuff. The reg delete command listed above didn’t work for me, so I ran regedit to open the registry editor window. The “HKLM” threw me, until I realized that in the window, that means folder “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.” Ahh! Found the silverlight folder, deleted the keys. I also went through the other folders under Registry Editor, and deleted any keys related to silverlight that I found.

Then went to My Computer, and found the MS Silverlight directory under Program Files…and ran into problems deleting it. There are two .dll files that I don’t have permission, even though I am logged in as the administrator, to delete. Hmmmph. Deleted everything that I could though, so I thought maybe I’d done enough to solve the pesky update error.

So I tried downloading the latest version of silverlight from the official website. Did that with no problem. Then tried installing the silverlight update from windows update…and voila! It worked this time.

What a fiasco…I don’t know if I had so many problems with this because this is Vista machine (I HATE Vista), or if it’s just me. I have three other machines running XP, and haven’t any problems with their updates. Of course, I didn’t even know what Silverlight was, or that it was on my computer…still not sure I really care, but at least I got rid of that stupid failure error!

Anyway, thanks for putting me on the right path…I do appreciate it!

By: gg

gg — Thu, 28 May 2009 13:24:56 +0000

i feel stupid :) Got it all figured out on my own. Thanks anyway.

By: gg

gg — Thu, 28 May 2009 12:46:32 +0000

what is one to do if once msicuu has been downloaded and you open it and run the install program “successfully” then why is it that when i open the application (if i can ever find it more than once) it does nothing?