Setup Err: INF Contains a Badly Formed File Description Line

ID: Q129715

The information in this article applies to:
  • Microsoft Office for Windows, version 4.3c
  • Microsoft Setup program

SYMPTOMS

After you perform an Administrative setup of Office, and you attempt to perform a Local or Workstation setup, you may receive the following error message:

The INF Contains a Badly Formed File Description Line: Too Few Fields (Commas)


CAUSE

This problem only occurs after you perform an Administrative setup of Microsoft Office and you then install Microsoft Word version 6.0 over an existing installation of Word version 2.0 (as part of a Workstation or Local setup).

The error message is caused by several incorrect lines in the ADMIN.INF. The ADMIN.INF is a file that has the same purpose as the SETUP.INF, but is specific to network installations. This file is located on Disk 1 (in the CAB file). During the administrative installation, this file is copied to the administrator's root directory and is renamed SETUP.INF.


WORKAROUND

WARNING: This modification is not supported by Microsoft Product Support Services (PSS). Although PSS will support some modifications to a BACKUP copy of the SETUP.STF file, PSS will NOT support modification of the SETUP.INF file. Note also that while PSS will help customers modify specific lines of an STF, we will not rewrite the entire file in order to achieve a desired configuration. As a general rule, support is limited to options that can normally be changed by a user during a standard installation of the application.

To fix this problem, you will need to do the following:

  1. Make a backup copy of the SETUP.INF file that resides in the MSOFFICE directory on the server.


  2. Open SETUP.INF in Microsoft Word or an appropriate text editor.


  3. Find the following section: [WW2 dot files]


  4. Add a comma to the end of each of the lines in the section. The specific lines are shown below: 
    
      1,LETBLOCK.DOT,,,,1994-06-10,,, OLDER,,,,,,,75776,,,,
      1,LETMDSEM.DOT,,,,1994-06-10,,, OLDER,,,,,,,13312,,,,
      1,LETMODBK.DOT,,,,1994-06-10,,, OLDER,,,,,,,13312,,,,
      1,LETPERSN.DOT,,,,1994-06-10,,, OLDER,,,,,,,12800,,,,


  5. Save the SETUP.INF file and exit the text editor. Be sure that you have saved the file as a text file.


Once you have modified the SETUP.INF file, you will encounter an additional problem. The files referenced by the INF are never copied to the administrator's directory during an Administrative installation. This is due to some missing logic in the Admin tree; the CopySection object for these files is never called. As a result, when you perform a workstation or local setup after the administrative setup, you receive the following error message:
Unable To Open File <server/share>\MSOFFICE\LETBLOCK.DOT
A similar error will be encountered for each of the above files. To work around this problem, you will need to extract the above files to the MSOFFICE directory on the server. These files are located on disk 16. Once the files have been manually extracted, you can continue with the workstation or local installation without receiving the error message.

For information about coping files from cabinets on DMF-formatted disks, please see the following article(s) in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
Q120006 XL5C: How to Copy Files from Cabinets on DMF-Formatted Disks

Additional query words: 4.30c 5.00 word 2.00 6.00

Keywords : offwin
Version : 4.30c
Platform : WINDOWS
Issue type :


Last Reviewed: June 17, 1999
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