Problems installing Google Earth client or plugin

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3 min. reading

Sometimes any attempt to install Google Earth standalone program or a plugin for your favorite browser ends up with error message: Error during execution of GoogleEarth.exe. Cannot find specified file. If you’re installing a plugin, directly from your browser, you can see an additional message saying that installation failed with error number 9. I don’t know, what exactly causes this to happen, but found an easy workaround for this.

Google Earth is in 7.0 beta version right now, as I’m writing this. Maybe “beta” caused, that the wasted this thing a little bit? I think that the problem is caused by setup program that unpacks its contents to a temporary directory, which name starts with a dot. And as we all know, Windows doesn’t like these folders, which are so common under other operating systems. I’m not sure, if I’m quite right, but the reasons for problem to appear are not that important like a solve to it.

First of all, get the standalone installer version of Google Earth. You can get it for example here. Only make sure to click and open advanced setup field and uncheck first checkbox. Preventing Google Earth from automatic updates will give you full, standalone version of setup program (GoogleEarthWin.exe — 23,2 MB for version 7.0 beta), where you would get stub-one (much smaller, 745 kB GoogleEarthSetup.exe), which requires you to stay on-line for entire setup process. There is a chance that you also achieve, what I wrote here, with stub version of setup program. But since we hate others deciding and doing something for us, let’s stay with full version of installer.

Now:

  1. Locate your temporary directory. It could be C:\TEMP, C:\Windows\TEMP or anything similar.
  2. Purge everything out of this folder, once you find it.
  3. Execute GoogleEarthWin.exe and wait until you see mentioned error message. Don’t click OK yet!
  4. Find new folder created in your temporary directory. It could be named anything like ._msige61.
  5. Copy this new folder to some other location.
  6. Click OK in error message previously displayed,
  7. Execute GoogleEarth.exe from copied folder to finally install Google Earth.

Once Google Earth has been correctly installed on your computer, you can remove all temporary files (including copied folder).

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