As we prepare to ship a large minor upgrade known as Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1, I’d like to again remind you that large files – not just Windows Installer packages – that must pass through a SAFER check may fail because enough contiguous memory cannot be allocated on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. I have posted a workaround, but wanted to note that a more automation-friendly method can be used.

If you run into this problem, you can disable the SAFER check for local administrators by following these instructions as well as those documented previously:

1. Set the DWORD value PolicyScope to 1 in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREPoliciesMicrosoftWindowsSaferCodeIdentifiers key
2. Run “net stop msiserver” (without quotes)
3. Install the EXE or MSP (if you extracted the MSP from the EXE).

It is recommended that you reset this value back to 0 when finished. The SAFER check is there to help protect users from malicious files, which is especially important if you’re an administrator on the system.