Installation ended prematurely because of an error

I had started having this problem recently and decided to blog the solution because I couldn't find it elsewhere.

This was happening when I went to install QlikView 9 SR5 but it is actually an issue with the Wise installer rather than QlikView specifically. My problem is on Windows 7 64bit.

What happens is that the Wise installer is trying to use VBScript and if it fails then it will give this message. If you log the installer you will see messages like:

DEBUG: Error 2896: Executing action WiseNextDlg failed.

Googling the message led me to try re-registering the VBScript.dll file (both in System32 and SysWOW64). However, that did not help.

Using Process Viewer (sysinternals) I noticed that it was loading the following registry entry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Wow6432Node\CLSID\{B54F3741-5B07-11CF-A4B0-00AA004A55E8}

This GUID - B54F3741-5B07-11CF-A4B0-00AA004A55E8 - is the GUID for VBScript. However, the entries under it were invalid. There was also another HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE entry that was valid. It appears that Windows will go for the current user entry first.

I renamed the registry entry under HKCU and re-ran the installer and all is now well.