[Bug 5409] ie6setup fails with "The download location information is damaged"

Thu Jun 15 03:54:53 CDT 2006

Bugzilla said:
 > ie6setup fails with "Yhe download location information is damaged"

I have seen this problem recently and I can confirm that it also happens 
when trying to install IE6 on Windows 98.

Here is what happens based on Ethereal traces and a good deal of 
patience. When you install IE6 it downloads the following URL:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie6sp1/download/rtw/x86/ie6sites.dat

The first time a computer (i.e. an IP address as visible from the 
Internet) tries to get that URL, it gets a 216 byte HTML file. Here it 
is in full:

--- cut here ---
<HTML><HEAD><META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0.1; 
URL=/windows/ie/ie6sp1/download/rtw/x86/ie6sites.dat">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no cache">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="-1">
</HEAD></HTML>
--- cut here ---

This is not what the IE6 installer expects and whenever it gets that it 
prints the error message mentionned above, even when running on Windows.

However, if you redownload that URL within 20 minutes after that first 
try, you should get a 2788 bytes file that lists the available download 
servers. This is what the IE6 installer wants and then it will work fine 
(at least in CrossOver, there may be other issues in Wine).

In some cases I only got the expected file on the third try. This is 
easy to check by running wget a couple of times. The 20 minutes have 
been determined through (automated) trial and error and are very 
annoying when trying to reproduce the problem. My guess would be that 
this is a configuration bug in Microsoft's server and that they don't 
care much since nobody installs IE6 from scratch (it comes preinstalled 
on Windows XP and greater).

So it's really not Wine's fault and there is not much it can do to work 
around that bug.

-- 
Francois Gouget
fgouget at codeweavers.com