light.exe : error LGHT0306 : An error (E_FAIL) was returned while finalizing a CAB file.

[coolerdoncooper]

Question

Running two Windows 11 Pro vms on Fedora Linux. One vm runs light.exe 3.11.2 just fine and creates the .msi. The other vm has this error when trying to create the .msi using the exact same codebase, exact same toolset, exact same version of Windows, everything the same.

I define a WIX_TEMP on a D: drive with 100Gig free space. AV/WD off, full access permissions for all user and groups including the service account doing the build. It uses the same build artifacts as the other vm. The first cab file is created, there are ten files of a total of about 2Meg and I can extract them. But as it is finalizing the CAB file, whatever that means, it throws this error and quits.

The pipeline is being triggered by a Gitlab runner and we're using CPack. Doesn't matter if I run it from cmd, PS or bash or whether I run it with elevated privileges or not.

"Updating file information. Creating cabinet files. There will be '12' threads used to produce CAB files. Creating cabinet 'C:\Users\genshi-ci\AppData\Local\Temp\ipfrtun3#media1.cab'. light.exe : error LGHT0306 : An error (E_FAIL) was returned while finalizing a CAB file. This most commonly happens when creating a CAB file with more than 65535 files in it. Either reduce the number of files in your installation package or split your installation package's files into more than one CAB file using the Media element."

Open Source Maintenance Fee

• I pay the Open Source Maintenance Fee by sponsoring the wixtoolset project because I support the maintainers.

[robmen]

Hmm, creating a 2MB cabinet with just 10 files seems like a pretty straightforward case. However, WiX v3.11.2 is really old. I'm not sure if this has been fixed, but you'd want to at least try the latest WiX v3.14 (although it's out of community service as well).

[coolerdoncooper]

The problem was Nvidia drivers "corrupting" the .wsx files from v3.11.2.

So the take away is that this particular light.exe error can be caused by bad .wsx files in v3.11.2 even if they are well formed xml.