Randem Systems Support Board

Yes, Some of us still have some legacy apps out there and they still need support. If you are one of those that use Crystal Reports 8.5 you may be cringing on setting up that development machine again. Here are the steps involved with installing Crystal Reports 8.5. Crystal Reports will alter registry permissions incorrectly and damage your registry. But what this really does it to create problems in your registry so when other programs attempt to read certain registry entries, they cannot and will fail. This is very true with some programs that use some ODBC connections. You also may not be able to add any new ODBC connections because of Crystal Reports.

• Create a System Restore Point name it Before Crystal Reports(Just in case)
• Open Registry Editor and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ODBC\ODBCINST.INI (64bit)
• Right click on the key (ODBCINST.INI), then select Permissions. You will see that all permissions exist and are OK
• Install Crystal Reports 8.5 in the normal process but DO NOT CLOSE THE REGEDIT!!!
• After installing CR 8.5, switch to RegEdit, go to the menu to select View->Refresh or press F5 to refresh RegEdit
• Re-open the permissions on ODBCINST.INI and you will see that ALL the permissions have been deleted!
• We will need to put all the permissions and security back and re-take Ownership of ALL the keys beneath. The permissions, security and Ownership will be the same as on the ODBC key
• Checkmark Replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object select Apply
• After Adding the security and permissions back on ODBCINST.INI we will now need to change ownership
• Select the advanced button on the permissions screen.
• Make sure you delete all the entries that do not have inheritance!!! (marked <not inherited>)
• To change the ownership, go to the Owner tab
• Checkmark Replace owner on subcontainers and objects then Apply
• Do the same to the  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\ODBC\ODBCINST.INI key (32bit)
• You should now have regained complete access to ODBC

We have tested with installing CR 8.5 first then attempting to use the Registry Editor but that did not work out. It maybe because since we already have the registry Editor open we still have the old permissions to the keys before Crystal reports 8.5 changes them so we are able to change them back. If you get something wrong, just do a System Restore back to the pre-installation of Crystal Reports 8.5 and try again.

Attached are some screenshots and a complete list of all the registry entries that Crystal Reports 8.5 will attempt to alter or create.

Since my last post here I have been working on automatically removing the Crystal Reports 8.5 improper registry changes and have come up with a solution. I went into the Crystal Reports MSI file and removed the registry permissions changes from the installation and this works perfectly well. If you are still using Crystal Reports 8.5 on some old projects and need to re-install Crystal Reports on your development machine without destroying it, here's how...




• Download and install Orca from the Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=3138 (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=3138) or get Orca from the download below
• You can install the whole SDK or just the Orca part
• Open Orca.exe then navigate to open the Crystal Report 8.5 msi file (scr.msi)
• Navigate to the LockPermissions table in the left side pane of Orca and you will see all the permission changes that CR 8.5 will attempt to make in the right side pane.
  None of these changes are overkill and only mess up the registry
• Delete all the changes in the right side pane
• I also searched for everywhere a variable names CallRegFix just in case and deleted any reference to it (precautionary)
• Save the changes to scr_modified.msi
• Go to the folder where the Crystal reports 8.5 installation is stored and rename scr.msi to sci_org, then copy and rename sci_modified.msi to scr.msi in your Crystal Reports 8.5 folder.
• You can now run the Crystal Reports 8.5 installation as normal and it will not hange your registry permissions

Enjoy!!!

Now, if you just want to cut to the quick... Just replace the file scr.msi with this one then run the setup.exe to install.