QuickTime Issues – Poxy Apple Software

What a waste of 3 days this has been!

A problem was reported to me – someone couldn’t view a webpage with a QuickTime move in it.
Given that QuickTime was in need of an update as it was well out of date, I decided to update it first.

I am really not sure what the hell was going on, but it was plagued with errors. The main one being when I created the deployment package in SCCM it deployed the Apple Application Support MSI but then failed deploying the QuickTime MSI. The Apple Application Support MSI was a dependency of the QuickTime MSI. That worked fine but the QuickTime MSI failed saying that a version of QuickTime was already installed.
So I deployed a clean image to my test machine that included QuickTime and set about deploying the new version of QuickTime. Same error again – a version of QuickTime was detected again. Ok so much for upgrade! So I removed all Apple components and deployed QuickTime again. The same error.
I double checked and went through the registry and removed every Apple reference, went through ProgramData and removed everything Apple and in Program Files and Common Files etc. With everything gone I deployed it again. The same error?!?!

I then decided to run the MSI files manually. The Apple Application Support installed fine, but the QuickTime failed again with the same error.
This time I ran SysInternals Process Monitor to capture everything so I could see what was going on.

Several hours later I came across a registry entry that looked like it was causing the error. I deleted it and run the QuickTime MSI again only to find the registry key was back and so was the error. Now that made no bloody sense at all?
Thankfully I had a weekend to forget about that crap and start a fresh on Monday, which seemed to work as I redone the 2 deployments in SCCM and it then installed Apple Application Support and QuickTime with no issues. I really do not know what happened there, as nothing was different.

So, back to the original reason for doing this, I checked the online video and it still didn’t play.
So after all that faffing I was no further forward!
I then renamed my roaming profile and logged in and tried it again. This time it worked!
I looked through the roaming profiles folder to see what Apple stuff I could find, but as I severely limit what is allowed to roam there was no Apple files / folders there.
I then coped the old registry file over and logged on again – movie didn’t play again.

So the issue was with the registry.
I loaded up regedit and went through all the references to Apple or Quicktime that I could find, deleting all then one at a time then trying the online video again.
I finally came across a key called

HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Internet Explorer/Internet/Registry/REGISTRY/USER
[SID]/SOFTWARE/Apple Computer, Inc./QuickTime/LocalUserPreferences

With a setting called FolderPath that was set to an invalid location.
I changed the location to a valid one and hey presto it worked! FFS

It’s so nice to see Apple software that is enterprise friendly!