WiX 3.0 throws error 217, while being executed by continuous integration

Question

This is the error that is thrown by our automated build suite on Windows 2008, while running ICEs (after migrating from WiX 2.0 to WiX 3.0):

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: "The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed. This can occur if the Windows Installer is not correctly installed. Contact your support personnel for assistance.". in light.exe(0, 0)

Additionally, these are the errors that show up in the event log:

MSIInstaller: Failed to connect to server. Error: 0x80070005 Product: [ProductName] -- Error 1719. The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed. This can occur if the Windows Installer is not correctly installed. Contact your support personnel for assistance.

Intuitively:

• VBScript and JScript were registered under admin.
• Integration service has permissions for the desktop interaction and all the files
• Builds succeed, when executed manually on the same machine by another user or even user logged in as integration account (via RDP)

I'm out of ideas so far.

How do I solve this problem while keeping ICE validation?

Answer 1

End of the story:

After fiddling with the permissions of the integration account, DCOM, service activation, etc. without any luck, I finally simply disabled ICE validation in the continuous integration build, while still keeping it in the local build.

To disable ICE validation you can set SuppressValidation to true in the .wixproj file:

    <PropertyGroup>
        <SuppressValidation>true</SuppressValidation>
    </PropertyGroup>

Or pass the -sval command line option to light.exe.