Windows SDK Woes

Finally got a Windows 7 PC at work. Installing the Microsoft Platform SDK kept on failing with a not too helpful error message.

Installation of the “Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7” product has reported the following error: Please refer to Samples\Setup\HTML\ConfigDetails.htm document for further information.

The log file is not too helpful as it contains many errors, but most of them seem to be spurious.

It seems that if a more recent version of the “Visual C++ 2010 x86 Redistributable” (vcredist_x64.exe) is installed then the SDK install fails. The solution is to first unistall the redistributable package then install the SDK.

Since the redistributables are updated with windows update I expect that this is a common problem. MS could at least put a note on the download page for the SDK about this.

David Dibben
David Dibben
Software developer of electromagnetic simulation systems