Corrupted Language Packs Block Windows Vista SP1 RC

In early December 2007, Microsoft went public with the testing program of the first service pack for Windows Vista. At that time, Vista Service Pack 1 Release Candidate was made available to all users of the operating system, with Microsoft advising that the Vista SP1RC build was still in beta stage and should be kept away from production environments. January 2008 marks yet another stage in the development of Vista SP1. Initially a new, private Vista SP1 RC build was dropped in the laps of a selected 15,000 pool of testers via Connect, TechNet and MSDN. A couple of days later, the company opened up completely the testing process revealing that it needs additional feedback. At this point in time, the freshest public development milestone of the service pack that can be grabbed by all the users is Vista SP1 RC Refresh.

However, the deployment of Vista SP1 RC is not going as smooth as possible. Microsoft revealed that there are issues associated with versions of the operating systems that have a corrupted language pack installed. "A corrupted language pack may cause one or more of the following problems: the Windows Update console is not displayed, and the Windows Update program does not run correctly, you cannot install Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) Release Candidate (RC) on the computer and you cannot add the ActiveX Installer Service (AxIS) in Windows Vista", Microsoft revealed.

At the end of the past week, the Redmond company made available for download Update for Windows Vista (KB947506). The update is addressed exclusively at the 32-bit version of Vista, and it will resolve the issues inherent with partially installed language packs installed in the operating system. Microsoft informed that update packages would no longer fail on Vista after the deployment of the update. And in this context, Vista users that have experienced problems with the installation of Vista SP1 RC, due to a corrupted language pack, will be able to access the service pack.

Microsoft explained the scenario that generates the installation of a corrupted language pack, describing that a "Windows Vista OEM Pre-Installation Kit (OPK) Tool disc [is used] to start the computer, and then you install a language pack to an offline system in the Windows Preinstall Environment (Windows PE). In this situation, the language pack is typically not installed successfully. This behavior occurs because, by default, the Windows Vista OPK Tool disc does not include XML support. However, XML support is required to successfully install the language pack. Therefore, if you deploy Windows Vista to computers by using an image that is produced by the offline system, you may experience one or more of the problems."