Here’s a good reminder to everyone to try and keep their software updated. Last week I tried installing Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 on a virtual machine, just so that our team can have a play with it and kept running into this error:
The ordinal 242 could not be located in the dynamic link library msi.dll
It came up on the trial version, so I went ahead and downloaded the full version to try and install that. Same problem; so the issue wasn’t down to my installation file. I scoured the Web, but no one seemed to have that issue; an issue not with CRM, but with the installer that was trying to deploy it for me.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I noticed that the Windows 2003 installation I had on the VM didn’t have any service packs installed on it. I have no idea where I got this ancient version from, but the fact that it didn’t have any connection to the Internet meant I wasn’t too fussed about security patches, but in one of the service packs they must have rolled out some changes to msi.dll, because installing Windows 2003 Service Pack 2 cured the issue. Now, if only the error message had been more helpful I would have found the answer soon, but at least I managed to solve it before taking one of my colleague’s Adams golf drivers to my computer screen.
On the bright side, once I got the installer running, it identified what components I had missing on my installation (.Net Framework, XML Core Services, Application Error Reporting, yadda, yadda) and is happily installing all the prerequisites for me.
Thaks for your help
Same problem here and same exact scenario (installing Dynamics 4.0 on a Windows Server 2003 VM). Running Windows Update to grab all the up-to-date Service Packs solved it for me too. Thanks for the tip!