Hi Einar
Sorry - should have updated the update :-}
SQL Express was added as a prerequisite but Windows Installer, which the SQL Express installation requires, was not. When WI was added to the list it was installed prior to SQL Express which then installed successfully (except for the fact that I was installing from a network drive and lost the connection when the WI installation required a reboot :-{)

If I get a chance I'll look on the machine I installed to and see if the C++ runtimes are present (or were present before the install)

In practice our installations aren't going to be this simple anyway. Some users will have SQL Express or full MSSQL installed somewhere on the system and want to use the existing instance. I'm looking at using the Install namespace classes with WI Custom Actions but I'm not sure that this will be flexible enough to handle all the various options during the initial installation process.

Regards,
Viv


>Did you solve your problem?
>The reason I am asking is because I also had some problems installing SQL Express on some machines, what I ended up doing was adding VC++ Runtime Libraries as a prerequisite. I don't know why that worked but it seemed to fix my problem.
>
>Are you adding SQL Server 2005 Express Edition as a prerequisite?