Thursday, October 15, 2015

light.exe : error LGHT0217: Error executing ICE action [root-caused for particular case]

light.exe : error LGHT0217: Error executing ICE action

My builds were cooking fine for years, but something has happened overnight and installer builds (WiX 3.5 based) started to fail on ICE validation:
light.exe : error LGHT0217: Error executing ICE action 'ICE01'. The most common cause of this kind of ICE failure is an incorrectly registered scripting engine. See http://wix.sourceforge.net/faq.html#Error217 for details and how to solve this problem. The following string format was not expected by the external UI message logger: "There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A DLL required for this install to complete could not be run. Contact your support personnel or package vendor. ".
It is needed to mention that mentioned URL is no longer valid. There are two popular answers on Stackoverflow: disable validation or add account to Administrators. I rejected "Disable validation" workaround immediately. I am running legacy builds, so I have to run as Administrator. I want to quote SouthPark here:
I.e., all my scripts were running elevated. Googling for an answer did not help.
The problem is root caused to issues with Bit9 security software (which actually slows down systems significantly and Bit9 support is super slow, but it is topic for another post).