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It is needed to mention that mentioned URL is no longer valid.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:

Did I check his privilege? Yes. #SouthPark

— South Park (@SouthPark) September 17, 2015

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).

Solution for choppy/breaking/stuttering audio on Android for software engineers

If you are a software engineer and you are facing with choppy audio on Android and the only clue is the following line in the logcat:

E/AudioSink(54): received unknown event type: 1 inside CallbackWrapper !

then, don't be sad - you don't have to dig Android sources (you can do that, but is it what you really want to do?) to fix buffer underruns in media system ("1" is AudioTrack::EVENT_UNDERRUN).

I highly recommend to switch from MediaPlayer implementation to OpenMXPlayer, it did solve the problem with choppy audio for me. It has the same API as MediaPlayer, so it shall be super fast for you to try it out and finally switch (when you like it) to OpenMXPlayer.

You can find more details here:

1. Code (License is GNU LGPL) https://code.google.com/p/android-openmxplayer/
2. http://www.pocketmagic.net/android-audio-player-using-mediacodec-mediaextractor/

It's constructed based on the MediaCodec Api, so it can be used with Android 4.1 or newer. It's fast, easy to understand and robust, making it an excellent choice for your multimedia applications, regardless of the audio source you are targeting: local files or online audio streaming.

If you have other solution or you know some OpenMXPlayer issues, feel free to leave a comment.