It happen on a client. Every time they opened Internet Explorer or Outlook, they would get a Time Matters error and it would attempt to run a setup file. It was looking for a file called infoent.msi. No matter what you did, click Cancel, OK, the problem would keep recycling. A reboot didn’t solve the problem. Nothing would make the darn thing go away. I thought this was isolated to my client, until I started discussing it with other CIC’s. Marc Wexler had seen it and had a solution. The best solution came from Wells Anderson. Read on for the solution.
The True Cause
The cause of the error had to do with a Windows installer that had not “completed” all steps of its installation. The incompletion was triggered when you opened Outlook or Internet Explorer, most likely because the installation routine, in my case, an upgrade to Time Matters 10 Service Release 2 was trying to build integration to those applications and was interrupted. When you open one of those applications, it would then try to complete the installation, but since the installer had closed and removed itself, it could no longer find the file “infoent.msi” to complete the action. I am sure programmers could come up with a more precise explanation.
The Solution
You could call techsupport, if you were on annual maintenance. Or, you go to the Microsoft Knowledgebase and click on the article titled: Use the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility to remove Office 2000, Office XP, or Office 2003 (found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301). Or you could just click here to download the Cleanup Utility.
(1) Run the EXE to install the Cleanup Utility
(2) Find “Windows Install Clean Up.
(3) Find the entry for LexisNexis/Practice Advantage installer
(4) Click on Delete.
(5) When done, go into File -> Setup -> General -> Workstation Level and run both the Word Processor Setup and the Additional Program Setup.
The problem should go away.