Microsoft CRM Laptop Client installation issues......

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As the title says, this is going to be a freaky Blog and I think this is example number 1 that I am speaking the truth!

I prepared a VPC with an English Windows Small Business Server 2003. On this I installed a Dutch version of Microsoft CRM 3.0, and all of this was running like it should. The next step was to install the Microsoft CRM Laptop Client onto a laptop which was used by the customer to give demo’s internally. This laptop installation was previously used but then with a Microsoft 1.2 SFO client on it. I uninstalled everything regarding the old installation and did a reboot.

I added the laptop to the VPC domain, created a userprofile and run the clientsplash.exe from the CD (I didn’t install the client installation folder on the server). The setup runs a few checks to see what’s installed and what might be needed to be installed. In my case it said it needed to Install Error reporting, .NET1.1 SP1, MSDE 2000 and MSDE SP4. Everything seemed to go as planned, but the setup stopped when it was busy installing MSDE 2000 SP4, with the error code "1602 User aborted installation" in the crmclientinstall.log. I tried numerous times to reinstall it, but it failed again and again!!

Installing the SP4 manually gives SAPWD warnings, meaning you need to set a strong password before you apply this service pack. I have no clue which user account and password were used during install and SA with a blank (NULL) wasn’t accepted. I searched for hours on the net to find similar problems and of course with the solution, I was shocked that I found several same problems and all without a solution. I then bumped onto a page explaining this:

MSDE SP4 upgrade not recognizing SA password

The upgrade works fine when you don't have a database sitting there!

C:\MSDE\SP4\SETUP.EXE /upgradesp SQLRUN INSTANCENAME=CRM
SECURITYMODE=SQL SAPWD=pwd BLANKSAPWD=1 REBOOT=FORCE /L*v c:\msde.log

After doing as descibed above SP4 got applied, I did a reboot and I could install the Microsoft CRM Laptop Client without any problem. This kept me up all night but I did manage to make the customer happy because they had the laptop in time and could give a great internal demo.