Apparently having a corrupted installer metabase can raise havoc with installing Microsoft software. This example relates to my attempt today to install my new laptop with all the relevant development tools to do my job, particularly MSXML6, and SQL Server 2005 management tools and references. However, the install continuously failed with the following error message, “The system administrator has set policies to prevent this installation”. Apparently, event though I’m a local administrator, I don’t have permissions to install this particular software. Funny, I swore I was a local administrator. Nonetheless, I spend an hour or so disabling antivirus, firewalls, and even logging in safe mode, to no avail.

So the fix to bypass this error, download and install the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility and remove all instances of the failed install attempts of MSXML and SQL Server components.

Viola, problem solved.