Error accessing Project > References window?

Error accessing Project > References window? - vb6

In Visual Basic 6, when I attempt to access Project > References, it throws an error:
Error accessing system registry
I am:
Logged in as the local computer administrator
running Windows XP Professional and
I can execute regedt32.exe and access all the registry keys just fine.
VB6 was installed as the local administrator.
Any idea why this happens?
I'm running crystal reports 8.5 and it supposed to already have fixed that issue but apparently I still have the issue with 8.5 installed. I have also made the attempt of reinstalling crystal reports with no luck on the issue.

Depending on the Windows OS you have (I have Windows 7 Enterprise), you might want to try giving administrator rights to the REGTLIB.EXE (located in C:\Windws). Right click on the REGTLIB.EXE file. Select Properties from the pop-up menu. Then select the Compatiblity tab. On the Compatiblity tab, check/select the Run this program as Administrator checkbox. Click OK to save your changes. It might take take care of the problem for you. It worked for me. Good luck.

For me this worked:
goto C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VB98
change the property of VB6.EXE by right click->Compatibility In privilege level section, check the option Run this program as Administrator

If you're running Office 2010 (Beta) Word (apparently) writes a restricted registry key. VB throws the error when scanning the registry. The key I have is:
HKCR\TypeLib\{00020905-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}\8.5
For Regmon - Filter for Process Name -> "vb6.exe" and Result -> ACCESS DENIED. Helps find it very quickly.
Fixed it with PSToosl (PSEXEC) to run registry editor. The command line is,
psexec -i -d -s c:\windows\regedit.exe
psexec needs to be run with elevated-permissions.
Edit by Jim: I'm on a Windows 7 (x64) box. Elevated permissions require the PSTools solution. XP can get away with a little less.

You could try Process Monitor to see which registry keys are accessed.

I got this on a machine that I was using for VB6 development. I had been building a lot of COM DLLs from VB6 (without binary compatibility) and the cruft that had built up in the registry eventually got too much.
Have a look at what size the registry is and what limit you have set. I doubled the registry size and then went looking for a good registry hoover.

Here is a solution from Microsoft. It references the Crystal Reports problem, but the solution just uses regedit32 to walk the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib and HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID registry branches for dimmed keys and correcting the security on those keys. There are also instructions to fix the security if regedit32 is unable to access the key. Article ID: 269383

In Windows 7 go to start menu then right click "Microsoft Visual Basic 6" then select properties and click Compatibility from the dialog box that appears then tick "Run this program as an administrator".

Have you tried this? Basically, it seems that it is a crystal reports issue. Hope that helps.

Perhaps worth a try going to the "User Account Control Settings".
Regards,

When I installed VB6 on Win7-64 (using instructions easily found by a search engine), it worked fine. UAC was off -- i.e. set to "never notify."
After a few weeks I turned UAC on -- i.e. set it to its default. VB6 then couldn't compile because of the "Error accessing the system registry" problem. Unfortunately, turning it off again didn't help. Apparently the damage done by turning it on was irreversible. I can't explain why this should be, but that's my experience.
Giving REGTLIB.EXE administrative privileges while leaving UAC off sounded like a great idea, but that didn't work for me either.
Finally, using Process Monitor and PsTools as described in other posts here worked. However, I had to give Full Control to large parts of my registry to Everyone. This didn't apply just to isolated keys. It seems that the compiler needs to add keys to major nodes, so I had to open up these entire nodes.
Aside from the fact that working through these steps took hours, I'm now much more exposed than I was before I tried to increase security via UAC, However, I need VB6 and don't see another solution short of a new computer.
Lesson: Don't use UAC with VB6. Except if you've arrived here it's too late for that.

It's VB6 installation issue. Try to re-intall VB6 on your system. Otherwise open "visual studio 6.0" with "Run as Administrator". Then open/browse your project .vbp file via - New Project -> Existing tab.

I have fixed the problem. But none of the suggestion above worked. What I did is giving everyone full control over the SYSTEM key in the registry. This creats a security break. I am running 64bit Windows 7 with vb6 serice pack 6B.

I'm running Windows 10 Pro (10.0.16299 Build 16299) 64 bit. I was having this error when trying to compile a VB6 DLL.
I saw several answers in this post about running in compatibility mode as administrator. I thought I would first try just running in compatibility mode for Windows XP (sp2). I was able to compile my DLL after checking that box. I didn't need to run as administrator.

Related

Visual Studio Administrator mode in Windows 10

Not really sure of my exact question, but here is the situation:
I have an application (WinForms, C# .Net) that I am developing in Visual Studio 2012. It does a lot of things but the important bit is that it needs to read files from a certain location.
In this case, the location of the files is on a server and my machine has a mapped network drive setup for accessing the files. I can manually navigate to the files with Windows Explorer fine.
I have the following line in my code which is highlighting the issue:
System.IO.File.Exists("X:\\A Folder\\a_file.txt");
And that file does exist in that location. However this is where the problem occurs: if I build the solution and run the .exe directly from the "bin" folder (double-click). The code is fine, and it finds the file. But if I run it with visual studio then I get a "file not found" exception.
I am putting this down to the fact that Visual Studio is running in "Administrator" mode (I forget why I needed this, but I do). Now this makes sense if you consider that the "administrator" account does not have the "X:\" drive mapped. However, this has never been a problem until I upgraded to Windows 10 last week.
So my question is:
Does Visual Studio Administrator mode work differently in Windows 10? In this case, does it handle mapped network drives differently?
It's worth noting I upgraded from Windows 7, so I cannot confirm if this issue is also present in 8 and 8.1 or not.
And before anyone asks, let's just say it has to be a mapped drive. No UNC paths allowed!

So I have found a solution/workaround. Kind of seems like a wasted bounty now, so if someone has other suggestions that are better then please post and I will review them and award as applicable. Or even if somebody can make a more detailed version of my solution then I will award that one.
The issue is probably not specific to Visual Studio, but would occur with any application running with elevated privileges. Anyway, the solution I found is to add a registry key that enables the same shared drives to be accessible when running in administrator mode.
The registry key location is:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Policies/System
And the key to add is called:
EnableLinkedConnections
And should be created as a DWORD with a value of 1 (0x00000001)
I checked with the machines running Windows 7 and they do NOT have this key, yet they still work fine. So I expect this isn't the only solution, but it does seem to work (no side effects noted yet). I would assume that Windows 10 has a specific setting somewhere that by default prevents mapped drives from automatically being available with "run as administrator".
For reference, I found this information here.
In fact, here is a more "official" recommendation for using this reg key.

This is unlikely to have anything to do with Windows 10, just with the configuration of your machine. What you describe is normal and covered by this KB article. Nothing I can check for myself so just try the recommended workarounds, follow up at superuser.com if necessary.

Different users/system tasks maybe running. As such, you have the X drive mapped, but others do not. You could do the drive mapping on additional users on your Windows installation as well. As you stated, this should not be a Windows 10 only issue, but also Windows 7+ and elevated privileges.
Maybe you could use a configured parameter for the X: path and load at runtime, or even try using UNC paths which will resolve at runtime and not need the drive to be mapped.
\\ServerNameOrIP\A Folder\a_file.txt.
In the code, you would need:
System.IO.File.Exists("\\\\ServerName\\A Folder\\a_file.txt");

Disable JIT Debugger VS2010 WS2012 [duplicate]

Not to bore you, I'm gonna make long story short. Two machines, identical systems on them, identical programs (mostly). One has Visual Studio installed, one has ... uhmm, something else.
Sometimes when I try to install applications from let's say a CD, Visual Studio's Just-In-Time Debugger pops up, reports an "unhandled win32 exception in ..." and asks whether I want to debug using "New instance of Microsoft VIsual Studio 2010". If I choose Yes, it runs VS, if I choose No it closes the thing, and I'm back in Windows Explorer.
Which would be ok, except I know the application is perfectly all right, and this way I cannot install it (in this latest cast it was the client from my bank for internet banking and paying bills and such).
So, how do I get rid of that thing (just-in-time debugger)?
I don't want to uninstall VS since I'm using it daily, of course.
Edit 1 :: I tried disabling Just-In-Time debugging in VS's Tools/Options/Debugging/Just-In-Time, then unchecking all three checkmarks, but that just gave another error when trying to run the executable installation program.
An unhandled win32 exception occurred in autorun.exe [some number]. Just-In-Time debugging this exception failed with the following error: No installed debugger has Just-In-Time debugging enabled. In Visual Studio, Just-In-Time debugging can be enabled from ...
Check the documentation index for 'Just-in-time debugging, errors' for more information.
Very informative :/
Edit 2 :: The application runs fine on the other machine that doesn't have VS installed. To a large extent software on both machines is the same, with just some minor differences (systems installed from image). Minor differences: notepad2, ++, git, ... some small stuff that is left to dev's own choosing.
I don't want this to sound as rant against VS, since I realize it's taking that tone, but I extremelly dislike software that is not self contained and messes other software up. And I had the same problem before with other applications as well. So for now, I'm blaming VS.
If necessary, I'm willing to disable all kinds of debugging for this thing to work permanently (mostly use print statements anyways), if that will help. And if it possible.

I just had this problem today with Visual Studio 2013. This MSDN article:
Just-In-Time Debugging in Visual Studio works for me. In my case, I just rename Debugger to Debugger_del and DbgManagedDebugger to DbgManagedDebugger_del.
To disable Just-In-Time debugging by editing the registry
On the Start menu, search for and run regedit.exe
In the Registry Editor window, locate and delete the follow registry keys:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug\Debugger
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework\DbgManagedDebugger
If your computer is running a 64-bit operating system, also delete the following registry keys:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug\Debugger
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\.NETFramework\DbgManagedDebugger
Take care not to accidentally delete or change any other registry keys.
Close the Registy Editor window.

I am adding this response even though this is an old topic because I have just spent most of the day on this very issue and finally solved it. Every solution I found focused on disabling or turning off JIT debugging in Visual Studio, deleting keys from the registry or changing IE script debugging settings. But if you don't have a registered copy of VS, you have a problem. Of course, many of the solutions work in different ways but then you are left with the error above "no installed debugger has just-in-time debugging enabled" which no-one seems to have an answer for. However, the answer is not to disable JIT but rather stop server side debugging in your application. Unless you actually want to do server side debugging it is not necessary for it to be on.
It makes complete sense to me now because I had server side debugging turned on in ASP. Before installing VS, it made no difference because no debugger was assigned to handle the bugs so they were sent to the browser. Once I installed VS, JIT took over and did what tit was supposed to do.
So the quick answer, open IIS, click on default sites or your sites and in your application settings, ASP in my case, turn off server side debugging!!
It may not be everyone's answer, or even the solution to the above problem, but hope it provides more insight to this problem and help someone else.

regarding the key in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug and SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft, I could only change the Auto value from 1 to 0 and it worked.:
REG ADD "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug" /v Auto /d 0
REG ADD "HKLM\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug" /v Auto /d 0

If you're running the same software on two machines and it's crashing on one(which is what's happening if the debugger is starting) then you probably have something else going wrong on your machine. It could be that you've got driver incompatibility issues, or that some of the other software you have installed on the machine has incompatible versions of dll's...
You need to try to eliminate as many of the differeces as you can (easier said than done, I know)... If you copy the contents of the CD onto a local disk, does that help? If you shutdown your virus checker while you install the software does that help? Does it help if you turn the network off? You've said that both machines have 'mostly' the same, software, what happens if you uninstall some of the differences? Have both machines been patched to the same level?
As Visual studio is trying to start up when you have issues, have a look at the call stack and see what dlls are loaded, print it out... run some of the other software that crashes on that machine and do the same thing... look for any common libraries and do a comparison between the machines to see if they have the same version of the libraries...
Of course it could also be that it's a hardware issue (I've had intermittent failures before now because one of my drives was getting ready to fail and others because my graphics chip was running too hot)...
As I said, not really an answer, but some things to consider...
If all else fails... you're probably stuck doing your bills on the other computer (although another experiment might be to create a VPC on the broken pc to see if it worked then)...

Right click on Project--Properties. Select the 'Web' tab. Under Debuggers, check 'Silverlight' (beside ASP.NET that is already checked).
Now visual studio won't debug your javascript because fortunately it can't debug Silverlight and javascript at the same time. You can now attach your javascript to the browser debugger.

This problem was appearing when I started pdf viewer. I reinstalled this program in other folder (another disc in comp) and in my case it worked.

How to disable Visual Studio debugger?

I just had this problem today with Visual Studio 2013. This MSDN article:
Just-In-Time Debugging in Visual Studio works for me. In my case, I just rename Debugger to Debugger_del and DbgManagedDebugger to DbgManagedDebugger_del.
To disable Just-In-Time debugging by editing the registry
On the Start menu, search for and run regedit.exe
In the Registry Editor window, locate and delete the follow registry keys:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug\Debugger
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework\DbgManagedDebugger
If your computer is running a 64-bit operating system, also delete the following registry keys:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug\Debugger
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\.NETFramework\DbgManagedDebugger
Take care not to accidentally delete or change any other registry keys.
Close the Registy Editor window.

I am adding this response even though this is an old topic because I have just spent most of the day on this very issue and finally solved it. Every solution I found focused on disabling or turning off JIT debugging in Visual Studio, deleting keys from the registry or changing IE script debugging settings. But if you don't have a registered copy of VS, you have a problem. Of course, many of the solutions work in different ways but then you are left with the error above "no installed debugger has just-in-time debugging enabled" which no-one seems to have an answer for. However, the answer is not to disable JIT but rather stop server side debugging in your application. Unless you actually want to do server side debugging it is not necessary for it to be on.
It makes complete sense to me now because I had server side debugging turned on in ASP. Before installing VS, it made no difference because no debugger was assigned to handle the bugs so they were sent to the browser. Once I installed VS, JIT took over and did what tit was supposed to do.
So the quick answer, open IIS, click on default sites or your sites and in your application settings, ASP in my case, turn off server side debugging!!
It may not be everyone's answer, or even the solution to the above problem, but hope it provides more insight to this problem and help someone else.

regarding the key in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug and SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft, I could only change the Auto value from 1 to 0 and it worked.:
REG ADD "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug" /v Auto /d 0
REG ADD "HKLM\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug" /v Auto /d 0

Right click on Project--Properties. Select the 'Web' tab. Under Debuggers, check 'Silverlight' (beside ASP.NET that is already checked).
Now visual studio won't debug your javascript because fortunately it can't debug Silverlight and javascript at the same time. You can now attach your javascript to the browser debugger.

This problem was appearing when I started pdf viewer. I reinstalled this program in other folder (another disc in comp) and in my case it worked.

why does windows installer start up everytime i start up visual basic 6

it starts up windows installer with random applications on my machine . . after i click cancel a few times, it loads vb6 fine.
any ideas why this is happening?

To stop this behavior:
Start VB6
Open the Add-Ins dialog
Uncheck the "Visual Component Manager" Add-In
Source:
After VS2010, SP1, VB6 launches VS2010 installer

This is what a Windows Installer repair looks like. It means that something is broken in one of the installed products on your system. Ideally it's a one-off repair so you might be better off letting it runs its course and do the repair, except of course if it asks for a install CD that you don't have.
The Windows event log (Application) will have MsiInstaller entries saying what product and component has the problem.

It's possible a previous installation has not completed correctly.
Use the utility at the following link to remove any rogue installations files:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301 (broken link Aug.2017, leaving URL for "historical purposes").

As PhilDW has pointed out this is a Windows Installer Self-Repair issue, and can often be resolved by allowing the self-repair to complete once. At other times the problem persists and it should be fixed by other means. Even when the self-repair completes and the problem goes away, it can still resurface once you launch the conflicting application. Windows Installer is not easy to deal with.
In your particular case you might be able to get away with a "workaround" rather than a fix. By locating the main VB6 EXE file on disk (in its main installation directory) and manually creating a shortcut to it on your desktop, you might be able to successfully launch VB6 via this new shortcut without the self-repair kicking in. It might be worth a try.
This shortcut trick will not remove the underlying problem, but might help to "bypass it". Just for the record: the reason this might work is that the new, manually created shortcut is not "advertised" and will not trigger a key-path check of the installed product when launched. This is Windows Installer's way to verify that a product is correctly installed. Note that even if the workaround works, self-repair might still result during application use because of faulty COM data being detected (which is very likely the cause of the whole problem you are seeing, but give the manually created shortcut a try).
There is a rather comprehensive "article" on self-repair here: How can I determine what causes repeated Windows Installer self-repair? which might help to track down the cause of the self-repair kicking off in the first place, but fixing it can be a rather complicated process (so try the workaround first). It is a long article because there are so many different ways self-repair can occur. The common denominator is that different installers on your system are fighting over a shared setting that they keep updating with their own values on each application launch in an endless loop. The last application to launch will overwrite the registry or file system with its own setting.

This worked for me, for VS2010 RC:
"Please wait while windows configures Microsoft Visual studio 2010 Ultimate."
THe work around that fixes the issue for me was to run the following via the admin cmd prompt.
Md "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\common7\IDE\FromGAC"
from http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-SG/vsprereleaseannouncements/thread/572a0f8a-16b0-4e1d-b581-16be36a9b564

This was also happned to me.
Whenever i tried to open vb6, it started windows installer to configure "Autocad".
Autocad had not broken. and it was working fine.
I tried removing and reinstalling Windows Installer, But it did not solved the issue.
Then i installed Microsoft's "Windows Installer Clean Up Utility 2" from given link.
Using this utility i removed the autocad from "Windows Installers" Database.
After that VB6 never started installer again.
Keep in mind 'removing any entry from installer's database may be risky, but i had no choice. So do it on your own risk.
Download "Windows Installer Clean Up Utility 2" (this is a deprecated, unsupported and unsafe tool to use - Aug.2017. I will leave the link in for "historical purposes", don't use it).

WiX 3.0 throws error 217, while being executed by continuous integration

This is the error that is thrown by our automated build suite on Windows 2008, while running ICEs (after migrating from WiX 2.0 to WiX 3.0):
LGHT0217: Error executing ICE action 'ICE01'. The most common cause of this kind of ICE failure is an incorrectly registered scripting engine. See http://wix.sourceforge.net/faq.html#Error217 for details and how to solve this problem. The following string format was not expected by the external UI message logger: "The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed. This can occur if the Windows Installer is not correctly installed. Contact your support personnel for assistance.". in light.exe(0, 0)
The FAQ is now deleted, however, the text from it said:
In WiX v3, Light automatically runs validation-- Windows Installer Internal Consistency Evaluators (ICEs) --after every successful build. Validation is a great way to catch common authoring errors that can lead to service problems, which is why it’s now run by default. Unfortunately, there’s a common issue that occurs on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 that can cause ICEs to fail. For details on the cause and how to fix it, see Heath Stewart's Blog and Aaron Stebner's WebLog.
Additionally, these are the errors that show up in the event log:
MSIInstaller: Failed to connect to server. Error: 0x80070005
Product: [ProductName] -- Error 1719. The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed. This can occur if the Windows Installer is not correctly installed. Contact your support personnel for assistance.
Intuitively:
VBScript and JScript were registered under admin.
Integration service has permissions for the desktop interaction and all the files
Builds succeed, when executed manually on the same machine by another user or even user logged in as integration account (via RDP)
I'm out of ideas so far.
How do I solve this problem while keeping ICE validation?

End of the story:
After fiddling with the permissions of the integration account, DCOM, service activation, etc. without any luck, I finally simply disabled ICE validation in the continuous integration build, while still keeping it in the local build.
To disable ICE validation you can set SuppressValidation to true in the .wixproj file:
<PropertyGroup>
<SuppressValidation>true</SuppressValidation>
</PropertyGroup>
Or pass the -sval command line option to light.exe.

Adding the TFS build controller account to local admin group and restarting the windows service did the job for me.

I found the root cause. I tried everything I found, including custom validator extension similar to one posted in Re: [WiX-users] light.exe failed randomly when running ICEs..
It's not a concurrency issue as suggested in various threads. It's caused by a too large Process Environment Block (PEB).
It turns out Windows Installer can’t handle a process environment block larger than 32 kB. In my environment, due to number of variables set by the build system and their size (for example, PATH variable containing multiple duplicated values), PEB was about 34 kB.
Interestingly, per Environment Variables, Windows XP and 2003 had a hard limit of PEB set to 32 kilobytes. That would probably cause an easy-to-catch build break in an earlier phase of the build. Newer Windows' doesn’t have such limit, but I guess that Windows Installer developers limited their internal environment buffers to 32 kB and fail gracefully when the value is exceeded.
The problem can be easily reproduced:
Create a .bat file which sets environment variables which size exceeds 32 kB. For example, it can be 32 lines of set Variable<number>=<text longer than 1024 characters>
Launch cmd.exe
Execute the batch file you created
From the same cmd.exe window:
Try building the MSI package using WiX with ICE validation on OR
Run smoke.exe to validate your package OR
Simply run msiexec /i Package.msi
All the above commands will end up reporting Error 1719 - Windows Installer could not be accessed.
So, the solution is - review your build scripts and reduce number and size of environment variables so they all fit into 32 kB. You can easily verify the results by running:
set > environment.txt
The goal is to get file environment.txt smaller than ~30 kB.

The correct description (without a solution, except if adding the CruiseControl account into local administrators group can pass as a solution) of the problem:
Quote from Wix 3.5 & Cruise Control gives errorLGHT0217:
ICE validation needs an interactive account or administrator privileges to be
happy. See for example WiX Projects vs. TFS 2010 Team Build (2009-11-14) or Re: [WiX-users] Help with building patch (2009-11-20).

imagi is totally right! I could not believe this is the true answer. Supressing validation and making TFS user Administrator are not good solutions. Plus I could not find NT\Authority to add it to Administrators group and was totally stuck in this.
I got the same error on Windows Server 2012 Datacenter as Build Agent.
To solve the problem :
List item
Go to Environment Variables on the build agent machine
Create two System Variables
"PF86" which is equal to "C:\Program Files (x86)"
"PF" which is equal to "C:\Program Files"
They are so short because I want to save characters.I made them without the final backslash because TEMP, TMP and others were made so and I decided to stick to MS standard for these variables.
Edit PATH variable by substituting every "C:\Program Files (x86)" with %PF86% and every "C:\Program Files" with %PF%
Close and build and enjoy!
It worked for me. :)
UPDATE
I found a better solution : Rapid Environment Editor will do all this and even more for you. Automatically.

I faced the same problem and did not like to suppress ICE validation. My setup: I used my own computer as a build agent on Visual Studio Online (VSO). My solution was to change the account used to run the service on my machine. Instead of using Network Service or Local Service I simply made the service log on with my own account which had all the necessary rights.

From http://wix.sourceforge.net/faq.html#Error217:
In WiX v3, Light automatically runs validation--
Windows Installer Internal Consistency Evaluators (ICEs)
--after every successful build. Validation is a
great way to catch common authoring errors that can lead to service problems,
which is why it’s now run by default. Unfortunately, there’s a common issue
that occurs on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 that can cause ICEs to
fail. For details on the cause and how to fix it, see
Heath Stewart's Blog
and
Aaron Stebner's WebLog.

I was getting same ICE error, but the problem turned to be corrupted Windows Installer Service.
This solution worked for me:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315353
Log on to your computer as an administrator.
Click Start, and then click Run.
In the Open box, type cmd, and then click OK.
At the command prompt, type msiexec.exe /unregister, and then press ENTER.
Type msiexec /regserver, and then press ENTER.
Restart Windows
Also, verify that the SYSTEM account has full control access permissions to the
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT hive in the Windows registry. In some cases, you may also have to add Administrator accounts.

I have some suggestions.
Try updating the Microsoft Installer version on the build server
Make sure you use the newest release of WiX 3.0, since it's 3.0 release stable now.
If all else fails, try running the build service under a specific build user who you can fiddle with permissions for...

I got this error from my Azure build agent running on-premises.
My solution was to upgrade its user account from "Network Service" to "Local system account".

Go to your build machine and restart the Windows Installer service

None of the above suggestions worked for me, for me the anti-virus (mcafee) came into the picture and looks like it updated the vbscript.dll registry entry to a wrong DLL location. These are the things to keep in mind:
Some of the WiX ICE validations are implemented using VBSCRIPT.
So while compiling the MSI, the build server would need access to the c:\windows\system32\vbscript.dll.
Chances are that somehow the user that runs your build lost access to this DLL.
As mentioned in the above answers do look for the admin access/registry access and make sure your user has it.
Here are the steps that I took to fix the issue:
Open cmd (run as admin) on the build agent machine.
Run RegEdit
Select the root, then click ctrl + f and Search for the following registry entry : {B54F3741-5B07-11cf-A4B0-00AA004A55E8}
Look for the InprocServer32\Default Key
On my build agent, the path was replaced with a mcafee DLL location. I updated the path back to c:\windows\system32\vbscript.dll
Editing the registry entry was not easy, as it was a protected registry entry. I used the below link to get access permissions changed before I could edit the property: Edit protected registry entry
Once I updated the path, everything started working as usual.

My solution is similar to Vladimir's one. My CI user was admin of the computer.
But the following steps were mandatory to allow my jenkins build to succeed:
log in as CI user using rdp
open a dos command prompt
execute: %windir%\system32\msiexec.exe /unregister
execute: %windir%\system32\msiexec.exe /regserver
then i got a successfull job

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