MSI installation with Folder Redirection fails.

Question

We have an issue with some msi-installers (Firefox, Google Chat) running on a system with Folder Redirection enabled. We set UNC path to Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\AppData variable. Installation fails with error "Failed to Create AppData Cache Folder".
We found that these installers work fine with Windows Installer V 5.0.17763.404 and fail with Windows Installer. V 5.0.19041.1. We found out that new version of Windows Installer tries to set special permission on the folder ...\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Installer. It seems that it has troubles to access remote ...\Microsoft\Installer directory in general.

Answer 1

As stated here https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61387044/msi-error-failed-to-create-appdata-cache-folder the issue could be fixed in Windows 10 1809 by uninstalling April's cumulative update KB4549949 but unfortunately recent versions of Windows 10 have the problem out of the box.

Answer 2

Hi,
Thanks for your findings and sharing.

For MSI installation, you could enable the MSI log to get more detailed information when encountering installation errors.

How to enable Windows Installer logging
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/223300/how-to-enable-windows-installer-logging

Thanks,
Jenny

Answer 3

We are having the same issue as OP.

We are hosting our appdata in work folders on our Domain Server and the installation fails, except when choosing the "Install all Users" option.

We also get the same error message as OP.

Our Domain is hosted on Windows Server 2019 64 Bit