Visio 2010 not detected

Question

I am trying to install 3.1.6 Beta on my Windows Server 2008 R2 (x64) system with Office 2010 (x86) and Visio 2010 Professional installed.  When I run the installer the first dialog box that pops up is titled :SDL Modelling Tool" and says "Microsoft Office Visio must be installed prior to the installation of the SDL Threat Modeling Tool. Would you like to navigate to the Visio web site?"  Clicking No ends the installer, clicking yes opens the Visio web site then exits the installer.

 

I get the same results when trying to run the installer from an elevated command prompt so I don't think it is a UAC issue. 

Has anyone else come across this issue?  I suspect there is a bug in the Visio detection on x64 with x86 office installed.

Answer 1

Thanks to dark.exe I found the problem.  I have a small SSD boot drive and a larger magnetic drive on my system.  I have Visio installed on the non-system drive (like just about every other program I have installed).  Unfortunately the installer is not smart enough to figure that out as it just does a directory search on the program files folder to try to find a file named "visio.exe".  I created the expected folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14 on my drive and put a copy of visio.exe there.  Once that was in place the installer worked and I can now create my threat models.

 

If it's not too much trouble it would be great if you guys could change the naive logic to determine if Visio is installed with something more robust like this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1085214/how-do-i-programatically-check-if-visio-is-installed-and-where or an even easier solution which is to check HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Visio\InstallRoot for x86 Visio and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Visio\InstallRoot for x64 Visio.

 

Answer 2

I can verify that I am not having the same problem.  The tool works fine on my installation (when I copied the visio.exe file to the x86 Office installation directory on the C drive).  I haven't yet deleted that file so that may be a reason but I won't swear to it.

Answer 3

Jkuemerle, thanks for your feedback.  We are investigating the newer way of detecting visio.  You are correct in that it is much more robust.  Tad, the difference here might be that you have x64 office installed.  Try manaually creating the same thing but under c:\program files\ instead of c:\program files (x86).

Answer 4

Tad,

Did you uninstall visio beta and then reinstall the beta after creating visio.exe inside program files\microsoft offce\office14 and deleting the old one you created inside program files (x86)?  Can you also just verify for us what version of visio you have?  Do you have visio 14 x64?

Meng

Answer 5

Ted,

 

   Is it a crash handled by the TM Tool and in this case - is there a log file (in $TEMP$\sdltm\ folder) that you could share? Or is it a crash handled by Windows and displayed in a generic crash response window?

 

Adel.