Today I got my brand new Zune MP3 player which I did win at a Microsoft Event. Lucky me ;-). Ok install the software and you are ready to rockn roll, I thought, and I was wrong. Very wrong. At 94% of the installation it did stop with an error which was there even after a reboot. A quick Google search did confirm that other users had this problem also. One of the possible installation problems was the the Users group has the wrong name. Aha! I have a German Windows XP where the Users group is named Benutzer. The solution was to simply fire up the user management snapin and rename the Benutzer group to User. But wait I do not have installed a Home Edition of Windows XP. Darn there is no usable User Management Snapin installed. This was especially annoying since I did program a user and group management MMC snapin for my employer several years ago. I do even know the API calls. After trying around with WMI and DirectoryEntry, WindowsIdentity under Powershell, C# and VB Script I gave up and decided that there must be a simpler solution. And there was. The net command of Windows does allow you to programmatically manage groups and users. No rename there but it should be enough to create a Users group and assign it to my user account.
I add the description in German so others have the chance to find this information with Google/Another MS approved search engine.
Kann Zune Player nicht mit deutschem Windows XP installieren. Die Installation stoppt bei 94%. Um den Fehler zu beheben bitte folgende Befehle auf einem DOS command Prompt eingeben. Der String YourUserName mit dem aktuellen Benutzer Namen ersetzen. Danach sollte die Zune Player installation fehlerfrei funktionieren.
net localgroup "Users" /ADD
net localgroup "Users" "YourUserName" /ADD
net localgroup "INTERACTIVE" /ADD
net localgroup "INTERACTIVE" "YourUserName" /ADD
This will fix the error which do show up in the Windows Application Event Log.
An error occurred while applying security settings. Users is not a valid user or group. This could be a problem with the package, or a problem connecting to a domain controller on the network. Check your network connection and click Retry, or Cancel to end the install. Unable to locate the user's SID, system error 1332; (NULL); (NULL); (NULL).
Zune -- Error 1609. An error occurred while applying security settings. INTERACTIVE is not a valid user or group. This could be a problem with the package, or a problem connecting to a domain controller on the network. Check your network connection and click Retry, or Cancel to end the install. Unable to locate the user's SID, system error 1332; (NULL); (NULL); (NULL).
What do we learn from this. Even Microsoft does not always follow its own security programming best practices. The Users and Interactive groups can easily be retrieved via it's well known SIDs (Security Identifiers) and not by their localized names. For my vigilant Microsoft Employee readers I paste them here so they can fix this issue faster ;-).
SID: S-1-5-32-545
Name: Users
Description: A built-in group. After the initial installation of the operating system, the only member is the Authenticated Users group. When a computer joins a domain, the Domain Users group is added to the Users group on the computer.
SID: S-1-5-4
Name: Interactive
Description: A group that includes all users that have logged on interactively. Membership is controlled by the operating system.
I cannot tell you how good this player is compared to my IPod Nano which I incidentally did win also (no it was not an Apple event). It does still sync my MP3 folders which it managed to find somehow. What I do not like is that it does not show up as new drive where I can simply copy the files onto. This might be a tribute to DRM which will hopefully become history in the not so distant future.
Funny side note: At the back of my Zune are greetings from Seattle.
Hello From Erlangen ;-)