Mickey.. er.. MicroSoft hasn’t changed its ways one bit.  Despite providing us with Windows, and giving us Word, Excel, IE, and a ton of other stuff - it still hasn’t learned to be friendly to anyone but their own geeks and nerds.

I’m sure all of you have experienced the frustration of the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death), or else some error which keeps one of your programs from working properly - and all you get is a cryptic error message like “Error 0×80073712 - Get Help”.

Now I am a bit of a techie - I used to build computers for a living - but I would guess that the majority of you are not, and wouldn’t even begin to think about trying to solve a problem like that yourself, right?  But not me - I don’t have patience for calling computer repair people who simply don’t know what the heck they’re talking about, other than “format”, “virus”, or “hard disk failure” - because those are the three most common excuses used by technicians when they really mean “I don’t have a @#$%^&* clue”.

Anyhow - my friend Google found me lots of information about 0×80073712 - nearly all of which was completely useless or irrelevant, since the code means that some part of an install has failed.

However, I’m about to solve that for you.

0×80073712 means that a Windows Module Installation has failed for some reason or another.  To find out exactly what failed in Vista, go to Control Panel/Problem Reports and Solutions.  Once there, click on the link that says View Problem History - and if you know which program failed, you should be able to find out what happened, even if you can’t solve it yourself.  More often than not, the problem will be in bold letters and have the current date on it anyhow.

For installing Vista SP1, this error comes up under Windows Modules Installer.  Click on the most recent problem (in this case WindowsWcpStoreCorruption) and it will give you a report that looks something like this:

Problem signature
Problem Event Name:  WindowsWcpStoreCorruption
OsVersion: 6.0.6001.18000:1
Type:  MissingWinningComponentKey
Path:  x86_mdmnokia.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.0.6001.16659_none_25dc53bfb459fd65
OS Version:  6.0.6000.2.0.0.256.6
Locale ID:  1033

Well what the heck!  It took me nearly a day to discover this - but when I did, the solution was dead obvious - something had gone wrong with the x86_mdmnokia.inf installation file.

Ok.  I had sold my Nokia N95 in December, so this was an easy fix.  Uninstall the Nokia drivers - not the programs provided by Nokia, but the Windows Driver updates for Nokia - if you go to Control Panel/Programs and Features, it will give you a list of all the stuff you have installed - scroll right past the Nokia software down to Windows… and there you will see one or more files which (in this case) are labeled Nokia… uninstall them, you can always install them again if Vista doesn’t automatically prompt you the next time you run Windows Update.

So finally - 23 hours later - a simple uninstall of a few drivers (6, believe it or not) got me past the 0×80073712 error I had been trying to get past…  you think Mickeysoft could be any more cryptic about errors than they are now?  How easy do you think it would be for errors like this to pop up with messages such as “Windows has detected a driver installation problem during the installation of the Service Pack - do you wish to uninstall the Windows Driver for Nokia so that we can complete the SP installation?”

Fingers crossed - the download of SP1 has now reached 48% from the original 8% where it got stuck…

Once this is all done and I finally have SP1 installed, I’ll tell you how this affects your favorite casino software packages…