I was recently forwarded a link from Richard Balsley’s blog about 1603 Errors in SCCM, see http://richardbalsley.com/sccm-software-distribution-fails-with-error-code-1603-in-execmgr-log. He characterizes the problem like this: “When a local administrator was logged on during runtime, the application would install fine. It would also install fine if no one was logged on. However if a user was logged on without admin rights, we’d get the 1603 error.”
Richard shows how to look up the AppID in DCOM and provides a script to delete the RunAs key, which resets launch permissions to The Launching User.
I decided to further automate this process. InstallShieldDCOMFix.vbs uses WMI to enumerate the AppID, and then delete the associated RunAs key.
If you run this with no arguments the local machine will be fixed. Use cscript.exe //b InstallShieldDcomFix.vbs or comment out Wscript.Echo to avoid popups from messages. You can also run this against remote computers using the computername as an argument, such as cscript.exe //b //nologo InstallShieldDcomFix.vbs computername
Rename file from _vbs.txt to .vbs.