Note: I’m less sleepy and much more patient today, so now I’m correcting this blog entry.

This evening I was setting up a new instance of MOSS (Microsoft Office Share Point Server 2007) and ran into a error during installation. The installer would almost immediately display the following message and show a simple ‘Close’ button. Obviously this would be a bit better user experience (UX) if there was some way to determine what the particular error was that caused the installer to quit. (I have faith that the MS SharePoint team is working on this as we speak) After checking a few blogs and TechNet, I found the solution at David Longnecker’s blog which, ironically, is named Ramblings of the Sleepy.

“Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 encountered an error during setup.”

The fix was to install and run a tool from Microsoft called the, “Windows Installer Clean Up Utility“, and then reboot the machine.