AppFabric Installer Keeps Crashing

After being on site with a client to install SharePoint 2016, I ended up pulling my hair out even with the pre-requisite installer. This was an offline install, so I'd gone to major lengths to ensure that I'd got everything in my pre-req folder that I needed and that it was all the correct version.

Pre-requisite installer executed as I expected, set up the server roles and then started working through the various installers, however whenever it came to AppFabric, the installer would just crash. I tried checking that the PS module path hadn't been corrupted, checked that there were no strange compatibility settings being used. All looked good, but I was still hitting the same brick wall each time.

I then tried just running the AppFabric installer, however each time it started to do the work, the installer just crashed and tried to report the error to Microsoft. I couldn't see anything in the event logs to give me an idea of what the issue was, so I just started to dig around a little.

What I eventually spotted was that there were a couple of global environmental variables missing from Windows.

To fix this I followed these steps:

  1. Go to the Start menu
  2. Click Control Panel
  3. Select system and security
  4. Select system
  5. Click Advanced system settings
  6. Click environmental variables
  7. Ensure the following variables are in place:
    1. TEMP - set this either to a standard user profile path or to a custom one of your choice
    2. TMP - set this either to a standard user profile path or to a custom one of your choice
Once this was in place, the AppFabric installer completed successfully and the rest of my SHarePoint install continued as expected.

I hope this will save you the headache that I've encountered recently.

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