Today I connected with my laptop to VMWare Virtual Center using vSphere client. Because I had an older version of the client I needed to update and the installer failed with this message:

The Microsoft Visual J# 2.0 Second Edition installer returned the error code '4113'

I remembered this error from the last install of this client (about a year ago), it happens because Microsoft Visual J# was already installed (in my case it was previously installed by Embarcadero’s Rad Studio).

Last year I “fixed” it by modifying the msi file but I remembered that Assarbad posted an easier solution on his Blog a while ago.

His solution was to set a public property in the MSI (USING_VIM_INSTALLER) but it means we need to unpack the installer exe first to obtain the MSI file.
I figured there might be a way to pass this property directly to the installer. Launching the installer with /? as argument which shows us the possible Command line parameters:

InstallShieldArgs

Seems like /V is what we need and after trying several variations the correct one is:

VMware-viclient.exe /V”USING_VIM_INSTALLER=1″

Note there must not be a space between /V and “USING_VIM_INSTALLER=1”.

And then finally it works!

InstallationCompleted