solved: catastrophic failure 0x8000ffff installing windows live mail

Had a fun little job at work today. Laptop with a days-old install of Vista came back because the guy couldn’t install Windows Live Mail – kept giving him a frightening “Code: 0x8000ffff, description: catastrophic failure” message.

3 minutes of googling and I had the answer, thanks to this guy: Go here and download the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility, install it, and use it to remove every Windows Live app you have. Then try Mail again… works like a charm.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 13:55 and is filed under blog, techsup, work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.