Right-O! mrivera

After bashing my head against the wall for hours due to installshield problems, your solution worked. w00t!

The Sketchup/addons installers were crashing every time regardless of disabled virus prgms etc. or even safe mode on XP MCE 2005 UR 2. My laptop is only 6 mos old too Dell Inspiron E1505 Core 2 Duo 1.6 GHz, 2 x 512MB DDR2 RAM, 60GB HDD and Intel GMA 950.

At first, I thought it was an Installshield related problem. I had disabled some updater processes it runs at startup, so I tried enabling them and rebooting to no avail. So, I tried to reinstall/ uninstall Installshield, which is a next-to-impossible thing to do. I had given up on the whole thing, when I gave a last shot and reached this thread. A N D I T W O R K E D !

Why? I did some research, and came to the following conclusions:

1. Renaming the TEMP & TMP environmental variables has nothing to do with it, not even changing their location to a different partition makes any difference. 2. DEP, whether enabled for Windows processes only will help. If you enable DEP for all programs (& your processor has hardware DEP support, that is NX bit or XD bit whatever) then DEP will make Installshield crash, but it'll tell you that it did so, and what you can do to make it work. You don't have to disable DEP, just place a check next to the "setup.exe" entry it creates in the exceptions list (Rt. click "My Computer", Properties, Advanced, Performance, DEP tab). This'll wor for all addon installers as well. (and "setup.exe" if kept checked after you're done installing will allow viruses' setup.exes to skip DEP as well). This does NOT solve the problem though, installer continues to crash, 3. The reason? It's a 16-bit process (BAD Google,BAD). It doesn't know that there's a DEP system. But what really buries the matter is VISUAL STYLES. I concluded that anyone with a PATCHED uxtheme.dll (that means many people, if you have "special" visual styles other than the three XP defaults, your uxtheme is patched) gets an installer crash. If your uxtheme has never been patched you're good, no need to disable Visual Styles for Sketchup's installer, but otw you must do it. (BAD Google, fix this silliness). See, "Windows Classic" don't use uxtheme, so it's fine.

Someone, please confirm this. I mean someone with an unmodified uxtheme, please check if the installer works. Otw, it means that the installer is really outdated and isn't really XP-compatible by forcing you to disable Visual Styles on it.

Oh, and finally, some people might have an additional layer of protection. Right Click your installer and see if it has an "Unblock" button there. Click it, it helps.