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.