I recently began encountering a problem where one of our application packages was getting hung during the install process. I could see the program directory correctly populated with application files but it seemed to get hung at end, and msiexec processes continued to run indefinitely. After manually killing each process, I checked to see if the application actually completed installing. When trying to run one of the applications that has a dependency on one of the failed MSI’s APIs, I encountered the following:

Further, Outlook was crashing when trying to load the application’s main component.

My guess was that the application’s components were not getting registered. To confirm, I manually registered all the components in the program directly via the command line:

FOR /R "C:\Program Files (x86)\ApplicationFolder" %G IN (*.dll) DO "%systemroot%\system32\regsvr32.exe" /s "%G").

Afterwards, the application with the dependency launched without error and Outlook was no longer crashing. However, the root issue still needed to be identified as I had no idea what else in the MSI was failing to complete. After manually deleting the components from the file system (it was missing from Programs and Features), I ran the MSI again and this time used Process Explorer to look inside the hung msiexec processes. There were multiple processes running, but I could see one process, though, eating CPU resources, and this was likely where I might find the culprit:

Opening the process details, I select the Threads tab. The thread that is doing all the work (or in this case getting hung up) is indicated by the Cycles tab. From here, I opened the thread by selecting it and clicking Stack:

Stacks are read from the bottom up. You can see a 3rd party component here (HCApi – McAfee HIPS) at play. Note, this might not be entirely abnormal as you can always expect any anti-virus suite to be hooking itself into any number of processes. So, to confirm what I was seeing, I used the Task Manager to dump the msiexec process that was using the CPU time by right-clicking it and select Create dump file (which can also be done via Process Explorer):

Dumps can be analyzed with WinDbg or a tool like DebugDiag 2.0. I have grown increasingly lazy and forgetful over the years with WinDbg. It has a very high learning curve and if you don’t use it much, its easy to forget everything except the old faithful !analyze –v or !analyze –v –hang. I used DebugDiag instead. When it is installed, simply right-click the dump file and select Analyze Crash/hang Issue from the context menu and point it to the crash file.

It will do its best to figure out the issue in the most vague way and you almost always need to do some interpretation of your own. For the most part, the analysis summary can be ignored.

A little bit down in the report points me to what I was seeing in Process Explorer with the problem thread that was using all the CPU time:

You can click the Thread ID like a hyperlink to follow it down in the report, expanding the thread. It reveals a familiar site. However, there is a bit more insight as the entry point is revealed and I can see the problem has something to do with the CustomAction table of the MSI itself.

Through a quick process of elimination using Orca to remove some of the rows in the CustomAction table, I narrow down the cause specifically down to action ISSelfRegisterCosting.

Without that row, the MSI install completes normally; or so at least it seems. I have no idea what removing this action might have elsewhere so this merely a hack. To further confirm the problem is being caused by McAfee, I perform the install on a virtual machine where McAfee is not installed and it proceeds normally. I then reach out to our McAfee enterprise admin and ask him to disable HIPS on one of my workstation. After doing so, the MSI runs and the application installs as expected. He inherits the problem.

Update

This has since been corrected by MacAfee with a HIPS update. One of the DLLs trying to get registered was getting blocked.