Home/ Questions/Q 772485
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-14T18:48:36+00:00

Sometimes, when running an InstallShield installation, an error dialog will appear containing the text

  • 0

Sometimes, when running an InstallShield installation, an error dialog will appear containing the text "1158", and OK button, and nothing else. InstallShield error 1158 means there was a problem with loading strings from the associated ini file, but Flexera’s troubleshooting steps have not worked for me. Also, I doubt that there is actually a problem with the strings; the information on that page suggests that a problem with strings would not be intermittent.

Here are the results of my investigation so far:

  • The problem occurs before any other dialogs are displayed (including the prerequisites dialog), which leads me to believe this is a problem with the bootstrapper (setup.exe), not Windows Installer.
  • The problem is intermittent, occurring frequently on some machines and almost never on others.
  • The problem is not related to a particular build of the installation. The same setup.exe might fail one time and succeed if run again on the same machine.
  • The problem appears to be related to Windows Explorer. I’ve never been able to reproduce this by launching the setup.exe through other means (e.g. cmd.exe).
  • This hampers debugging efforts, since passing command line arguments to generate debug logs causes the installation to succeed.
  • I’ve only seen this problem on Windows XP.
  • This may not mean anything since newer versions of Windows are not used often within my company.

Has anyone else encountered this problem or know of a fix?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I opened a support ticket with Flexera to get to the bottom of this. Based on their responses, this is a translation problem with the setup.exe bootstrapper. In InstallShield 2009, if the “Setup Launcher Type” field (on the “Setup” tab of a release) is set to Unicode, this problem might happen sometimes. Setting the “Setup Launcher Type” to ANSI seems to fix the problem. Also, I have not experienced the problem in InstallShield 2010, so they might have already fixed it.

    As a side note, I was told that InstallShield 2009 was the first version to allow a “Setup Launcher Type” of Unicode, so this bug was probably introduced in that version. Prior versions always used ANSI.

    • 0