I recently was reminded of Everlight by seeing that somebody had included it in their game of the year list. I remember when this game first came out that it sounded promising, but I never bought it. I vaguely remember that it might have been that the demo didn't run well on my old computer. But with a new computer and finding that Dave at Interact had a copy in stock, my interest was again piqued, and I decided to give it a try. Much to my dismay, I couldn't even get it to install on my Win 7 64 bit computer. Searching the forum revealed several old threads with numerous people having the same problem. The only possible solution that I found was that it could be fixed by disabling or uninstalling AVG antivirus. I'm not using AVG, I use Microsoft Security Essentials. I tried excluding the Everlight setup program, but still no luck. I tried running the setup program as administrator, no luck with this either. After googling the web for this problem I found a number of different games/programs that wouldn't install, giving the exact same error message that I was getting. After wading through several possible "solutions" that sounded more dangerous than I was willing to attempt, I stumbled upon something that looked innocent enough, and I decided to try it. Much to my surprise, it worked! Here's what I did:

Open a command prompt with administrator rights.

Navigate to the folder containing the Setup.msi file on the DVD:

For me, this involved running the following commands at the prompt:

E: <Enter> (E: is my DVD drive, might be different for you)

cd install <Enter> (the setup.msi file is in the install folder on the DVD)

After you're in the install folder, run the following command:

msiexec /i setup.msi /qb <Enter> (in that last parameter, /qb, That's a lower-case Q, not a G)

Installation will begin, followed by DirectX installation.

Using this method I did NOT have the option to change the default install path. It was installed to the C:\Program Files (x86)\JoWood\Everlight folder.

This was not a problem because the game is Vista compatible and the config and saved game files were saved in the C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming\everlight folder. (In this path you will need to replace YourUserName with your actual User Name.)

I have played for about an hour with no problems. My setup options are properly set every time I start it up, and I have saved 4 different times and successfully restored each of them on subsequent start-ups. Everything appears to be working perfectly.

P.S. This pertains to the English DVD boxed version released in 2008 by The Adventure Company. There may have been other releases that I am not aware of, for which this might not work.

I did buy it, and had no problems installing it on XP. However the game did not play because of the DRM (SecuROM).

Anyway, thanks for the information about using
msiexec /i setup.msi /qb

Those who can't install the game at all may want to try it.

For anyone who is interested, there is information about the options for running msiexec here
http://ss64.com/nt/msiexec.html

Jenny100, check your PM.

Thanks for the info on msiexec.

You can get some of that info by running msiexec /help, msiexec /h, or msiexec /? from the command prompt. Those parameters /help, /h or /? can be used to provide additional info on a lot of programs that are run from the command prompt, especially those that have required or optional parameters, as does msiexec.

This fix could be easily adapted to different situations, and might possibly provide some relief for other failing installs that use .msi files.