Error 29528. The setup has encountered an unexpected error while Setting Internal Properties

We've just published a change to KB925976 on how to work around the following setup error:

Error 29528. The setup has encountered an unexpected error while Setting Internal Properties. The error is: Fatal error during installation.

We've also just published KB961662 which details how to workaround a problem you can encounter if you had used the original version of 925976.

Msg 7644, Level 17, State 1, Line 2
Full-text crawl manager has not been initialized. Any crawl started before the crawl manager was fully initialized will need to be restarted. Please restart SQL Server and retry the command. You should also check the error log to fix any failures that might have caused the crawl manager to fail.

These problems are related to SID management and the corresponding registry keys. In the earlier version of KB925976 there was advice to delete a registry key containing corrupted SIDs. This workaround was successful for all scenarios in fixing the setup error and allowing setup to complete, but it potentially causes problems with FTS as noted above. The new version of 925976 provides a more future proof solution.

What I also learnt whilst working on these articles was that there is a public sysinternals tool to get SIDs when you need to do maintenance such as this. You can download it here:

PsGetSid v1.43 - https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897417.aspx

This can be useful for many other scenarios and is worth remembering.