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SDK Setup problems? Please send us your logs

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Well, the Windows SDK RTM has been out for about a month at this point and things look fairly good. Over 300,000 people have downloaded either the web setup or ISO version of the SDK, which is exciting. We've far exceeded the number of users who got any of our pre-releases by a fairly wide margin. That feels awfully nice. We're also receiving many fewer user complaints than before. But I'm still fairly unhappy with this release.

My unhappiness comes from mail like this one from one of our users:

Dear Support Team:

Regardless whether I install from the WEB-Download or from a downloaded DVD ISO Image, I always run into the following fatal error when installing the latest SDK:

Please find attached the SDKSetupLog.txt.

Questions: Is there a way to correct the corrupted cab-file? Can the file be omitted by leaving out some option in the installation-settings?

Thank you in advance for your help

I'm not unhappy that one of our users wrote us. I wish more people did when they get errors. In fact, let me put this in bright red letters: if you have a problem installing the Windows SDK, please be sure to email me. Include a copy of your log from %temp%\SdkSetupLog.txt so we have some help diagnosing the problem.

The thing I find frustrating is that we have several bugs that result from not writing quite enough information to the logs. It's a balancing act to make sure that just enough information is written so that we can diagnose problems. If the log is too verbose, it will be enormous and slow down setup. If it's too small, it won't provide us enough information on what exactly is going on. We thought we had found the right balance, but unfortunately we seem to have erred on the side of not logging enough. Therefore on the top of our bug queue is to produce some fixes to our logging so that we can post an FAQ or blog post that describes what to do if you get particular errors. As things stand now, it's a bit of a challenge tracking them down.

Please, please, send us your logs. The more logs we have, the easier it will be for us to find the commonalities and track down the problem. If you're having problems with our product, my team wants to know about it. Speaking just for myself, I'd like to make it so that silence on setup means that everybody is having success. Okay, a guy can dream...