Possible problem adding a Zune in Device Center on a 64-bit OS using the XNA Game Studio 3.0 beta

  • Article

Description of this issue

We received a bug report last week from a customer who was unable to add a Zune to the XNA Game Studio Device Center after installing the XNA Game Studio 3.0 beta.  The customer was running a 64-bit version of Windows Vista on the system that this issue appeared on.  When clicking the Add Device button in the Device Center and selecting Zune, they received an error stating that they needed to install the Zune software on their computer, even though they had already visited the Zune download page and installed the Zune 3.0 software and the Zune 3.0 firmware on their Zune.

How to work around this issue

After some further investigation, we discovered that this customer had some incorrect information in their registry that was causing the Device Center to incorrectly report that the Zune software was not installed.  In order to allow this customer to add a Zune in their Device Center, we had them delete the following value from their registry after installing the 64-bit version of the Zune 3.0 software:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Zune]
CurrentVersion

After removing the above registry value, the customer was able to run the XNA Game Studio Device Center, add their Zune device, and deploy and debug their Zune applications using the XNA Game Studio 3.0 beta.

Root cause of this issue

In the XNA Game Studio 3.0 beta, on a 64-bit OS, the Device Center has logic to look in the 32-bit registry before looking in the 64-bit registry to determine whether or not the Zune software is installed.  It first checks the 32-bit registry value at this location:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Zune]
CurrentVersion

If this CurrentVersion value exists, it will check to see if the version value is 3.0 or higher.  On the customer's system where this error was seen, the 32-bit version of the CurrentVersion value was set to 0.0.0.0 for some reason, which caused the error to be reported because this version value is less than 3.0.

If the 32-bit CurrentVersion value does not exist, it will check the 64-bit registry value at this location:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Zune]
CurrentVersion

The 64-bit version of the Zune software only sets the 64-bit registry value for CurrentVersion, so we will be fixing the Device Center before the final release of XNA Game Studio 3.0 so invalid values in the 32-bit registry will not block you from adding a Zune on a 64-bit OS.