A customer phoned in with the issue that his Autodesk Revit installation failed. As they have done a web install and it runs, downloading in the background it is a problematic if you are doing the installation multiple times as it downloads the installation content each time. I suggested that they firstly download the install files from the Autodesk Virtual Agent found here.

In this case the, and as a example, I’ll outline the step to download Revit.

Step 1: Click on Download links.

Step 2 : Click on Revit Products

Step 3 : Click on Revit

Step 4 : Download the three Parts under the Revit 2018 64bit option.

Once they have downloaded the content I tried the installation myself. I switched off the UAC (User Account Control). To do this you access the Windows Control Panel and User Accounts.

I also disabled the Antivirus protection, setting it to enable upon restarting the PC.

I ran the first of the downloaded three parts and the software extracted to ‘c:\Autodesk’ directory and I ran the software from there.

The installation failed showing a screen similar to the one below…

Accessing the log file, it in the link on the it stated that the Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 redistributable could not be installed.

I uninstalled all the C++ objects using the Windows control Panel and tried the installation again. It still gave the same issue. I manually installed both the 32bit and 64bit C++ programs from the extracted installation files found at c:\Autodesk\Revit_2018_G1_Win_64bit_dlm\3rdParty\x64\VCRedist\ . I then ran the installation again but the same error persisted.

Running out of options I searched the forums and one suggestion was to remove the C++ 2005 from the installation prerequisites so that the installation procedure does not look for the C++ 2005 product to be installed.

Do do this I had to edit the Setup.ini file to remove the prerequisite. This file is situated in the same directory of the Setup.exe file used to start the installation. Opening the Setup.ini file in a text editor like Notepad I searched for all referenced to the C++ 2005 and deleted that text. Saved the file and run the installation.

The installation obviously now skipped the C++ 2005 prerequisite and went through with successfully installed.

I then made sure that the C++ 2005 is installed manually as other software might require the C++ 2005 software object to run.