Windows Live Essentials 2011 Web Installer from Behind a Proxy

You probably found this post because you tried to install Windows Live Essentials via the web installer (wlsetup-web.exe) and it sat on the 'Preparing to install...' screen for a while and you got this error:

Couldn't set up the installer
Check to be sure you are connected to the Internet

Details:
You cannot download Windows Live programs unless you're connected to the Internet.
Error: 0x8104000d
Source: WaitForCatalog

If you are sure you are connected to the Internet (i.e. other programs like your web browser work) then the problem is likely to be:

• It is being blocked by a Firewall - this could be the Windows Firewall, or could be built into a product like Norton Internet Security, or Sophos Protection, or could be a corporate firewall on your network.
• Your web traffic is routed through a proxy which is specially configured in your browser, and may require authentication with your Windows (or other) credentials. The issue with this approach, is that many Windows applications are not proxy-aware and assume they have a straight, unauthenticated connection to port 80 on external servers.

If you have a  firewall on your PC, temporarily allow all traffic and see if the installer will work. If you are behind a separate firewall, you would need to ask the system administrator to help you.


Relating to the second point above, if you are behind an HTTP proxy that you don't have control over (say at work), which is not configured to be completely transparent, then the Windows Live Web installer will not work.

It won't know how to connect to Microsoft's download server to get the packages for installation.

To my knowledge there is no standalone 'full' installer available, so we need to help it to use a proxy connection.
There is an offline installer for Windows Live Essentials, so you can use that if you don't want to mess with your proxy settings. It is 215 MB, though, so if you're short on bandwidth you should persevere with the web installer as this will only download what you select. Download Windows Live Essentials full install here.


On Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008, you need to do this:

Open a Windows command prompt - type cmd in the Start Menu

Type: netsh winhttp

You should then see:

netsh winhttp>_

then type:

set proxy yourproxyserver.example.com:port ""

OR, if you want to exclude some other domains:

set proxy yourproxyserver.example.com:port ";*.domain1.com;*.domain2.com"

(port should be 8080 or 3128 usually)


Then restart the Windows Live installer.

After it has installed, you can go back to the netsh prompt and clear your changes with:

reset proxy



Having trouble? Let us know in the comments!