As I’ve mentioned before, Error 1603 during an installation can be almost anything. It’s a generic error and you have to dig into the logs to find out what really happened.

For example, a customer reported getting 1603 during an install. So we looked into the %TEMP%\Autodesk_Softimage_x64_Install.log file, and found this:

2010/12/13:15:46:24	Administrator	DEADBEEF	Install	Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable (x86)	Failed	Installation aborted, Result=1603

Now that we knew it was the VCREDIST, we looked into %TEMP%\vcredist_x86_2005.log and found out that problem was that the Softimage install was blocked because installer could not remove an old version of VC++ 2005 Redistributable:

MSI (s) (98:3C) [18:28:15:187]: Product: Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable -- Error 1714.The older version of Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable cannot be removed.  Contact your technical support group.  System Error 1612.

Error 1714.The older version of Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable cannot be removed.  Contact your technical support group.  System Error 1612.

Error 1714 and google led me to the solution: rename the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\S-1-5-18\Components\F942F94A19C0F79468FD2B85E5E8677B.

After that, we were able to remove Visual C++ 2005 redistributable from the Control Panel, and then Softimage installed ok.