Wix installation fails on Server 2003 when using Wix Extensions

Question

I have an *.msi installation that uses Wix Extensions :

• WixFirewallExtension (To create firewall exceptions)
• WixNetFxExtention (To create Native Images at install time)

This msi fails with the error "Installation ended prematurely..." when attempting to install on Windows Server 2003 (both 32 and 64 bit). It installs on Server 2008/Windows 7 etc with no issue.

Removing the firewall and native image parts before building the msi allow it to install normally but obviously without the extra options in place.

Does anyone know what the issue could be?

Here is the part of the log file that shows the failure but it doesn't say why it failed.

Other Notes:

• Removing the firewall part but leaving the native image part still causes failure which is causing me to believe that any operation that uses an Extension will be affected.
• The firewall configuration is set to ignore failures.
• I have confirmed the firewall is enabled and running.
• I have tried installing from an Administrator command prompt but this makes no difference

Answer 1

It sounds like a bug in the WiX v3.8 toolset. There were issues in earlier builds where the new VS2012 compilers did not support Windows XP. That was fixed in WiX v3.8.422.0 or newer. If you are not running the latest build of WiX v3.8, I recommend upgrading and seeing if the issue is fixed. If you are running the latest build of WiX v3.8 then you might open a bug: http://wixtoolset.org/bugs.