Symantec Endpoint Protection Install Error 1603 Fix

Recently when installing Symantec Endpoint Protection at a client's office one of our technicians encountered an error. In the middle of the installation the process unexpectedly halted and rolled back all changes. There were no pop-ups explaining what happened. When checking the Event Viewer logs there was a single log entry for each stop: "Symantec Endpoint Protection installation did not complete successfully. Error: 1603."

When searching online forums for other people who have encountered this error, I found on Symantec's website that it is a very generic error number that simply means that Symantec encountered a fatal error during installation. It was said that any number of possibilities exist that can cause this.

Continuing on from there I did find that one person did experience the exact same issue that we did when installing Symantec. This works on both Windows 7 (what the person who reported this fix was installing SEP on) and Windows Vista (what we installed SEP on.) The fix for the issue turned out to be a relatively simple one. In the Registry Editor, find this entry:

HKEY_USERS.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\AppData value=%APPDATA%

Change the value to:

HKEY_USERS.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\AppData value=%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming

After changing this value our technician was able to install Syamantec Endpoint Protection without any difficulty whatsoever.