Who knew that windows contained two registries, I suppose that this should have been dead obvious given the appalling way Microsoft lurch from 16 bit to 32 bit and thence to 64 bit. I just hope I’m not around when they decide to migrate to 128 bit operating systems. I’m sure they’ll manage to come up with some amazingly non obvious name akin to SysWow64 (seriously, who did that!?) that surely serves merely to confuse. I digress…

Anyway yes, so two registries, I had to install an old piece of software that moaned about the minimum requirement of MDAC 2.6 not being installed and instead this windows 8.1 box only had MDAC 2.0.0. I scratched my head as looking in ‘the registry’ i could plainly see that MDAC version 6.3 was installed! Surely this should suffice?! But then something came over me, it may have been the temperature, it was hot for England nearly into double figures, it may have been the romance of spring playing on my mind or more likely I just got desperate:- Registries…..

It turns out that on my machine the default registry is the 64 bit registry, as loaded from C:\Windows. There is also it turns out after a quick 10 second search another regedit.exe (not found by the windows search algorithms) located within the folder C:\Windows\SysWow64, this is of course the 32 bit registry which is where i found my MDAC version v2.0.0. I was now able to change the MDAC version from 2.0.0 to 6.3 allowing my install to complete. I hope that this can be of help to someone, failing that, i got to vent. We all win.