Most exe's wont install -> not a valid win32 applicatio

I had Win 7 Ultimate 64bit up an running for a while, but I reinstalled Win 7 Professional 64bit on my machine because of my license. But now I am finding that about half of the programs that installed fine on 7 Ultimate will not install on Win 7 Professional. I keep getting the error " *.exe is not a valid 32bit application ".

I have tried playing around with all of the options in the windows compatibility box, but nothing helped. I am also logged in as Admininistrator. To install Win 7 Pro, I reformatted my hard disk and did a clean install. I have hardly done any surfing except to download printer drivers from HP, and half of those give me the same error message when I try to run their install programs.

I tried installing Windows XP Mode because I had that installed on Ultimate and I thought that not having it might be the problem, but even it wont install. It gives me the same error message.

I am at a loss for why this is happening. I didn't think that there is that big of a difference between pro and Ultimate, but maybe I am wrong.

Hydrology said:

I had Win 7 Ultimate 64bit up an running for a while, but I reinstalled Win 7 Professional 64bit on my machine because of my license. But now I am finding that about half of the programs that installed fine on 7 Ultimate will not install on Win 7 Professional. I keep getting the error " *.exe is not a valid 32bit application ".

I have tried playing around with all of the options in the windows compatibility box, but nothing helped. I am also logged in as Admininistrator. To install Win 7 Pro, I reformatted my hard disk and did a clean install. I have hardly done any surfing except to download printer drivers from HP, and half of those give me the same error message when I try to run their install programs.

I tried installing Windows XP Mode because I had that installed on Ultimate and I thought that not having it might be the problem, but even it wont install. It gives me the same error message.

I am at a loss for why this is happening. I didn't think that there is that big of a difference between pro and Ultimate, but maybe I am wrong.

There isnt. did you clean install Pro clean?

Feels like a permissions problem. right click one of the ones that wont launch and tell us who the owner is

Ken J++

I have noticed that the programs that wont install are programs that I have downloaded since this last install of Pro. It seems that previous programs that I have downloaded install correctly, although I havent tried them all.

I am having problems with Explorer 8, so that may be the problem. I have seen in another post that a program that has not completly downloaded can give you this error. I would think that an incomplete download would not even be recognisable as a program. Maybe just the last byte or two are consistantly being left off. I have Zone Alarm 2010 installed, and it intercepts downloads and scans them as they are downloaded. I will uninstall ZA and see if the problem still exists. You can see another post near this one that describes the problems that I am having with Explorer.

By the way, I didnt have any of these problems with the install of Ultimate, so maybe this install got screwed up.

That was it. Zone Alarm screwed up Explorer and it's download scanner was dropping the last few bytes from each downloaded file, even though it said that the download was complete. One file was 34 Kb larger than the one that I downloaded with Zone Alarm. Another file was 1.5 Mb larger than the one that I downloaded with Zone Alarm installed. Both files were in the 230Mb size range.

I should note that turning off Zone Alarm and just uninstalling the ZA Explorer toolbar was not enough. The whole ZA package needed to be uninstalled. ZA worked fine with Ultimate 64, I will see if reinstalling it causes the same problems.