Deploying Windows 7 Language Packs via ConfigMgr

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During a Windows 7 64-bit deployment project the customer gave me a requirement to allow users to install a variety of language packs without adding all of them to the baseline image to keep the size down.  They are already using ConfigMgr to advertise applications for user self-service so this seemed the most logical method to provide this capability.

Windows 7 language pack setup, lpksetup, includes parameters to support a managed installation.  I successfully tested the following from the command prompt:

lpksetup.exe /i de-DE /p . /r /s

I advertised a program with this command line, but it quickly failed.  The test system returned an error status message, ID 10003: “An error occurred while preparing to run the program for advertisement….  The operating system reported error 2147942402: The system cannot find the file specified.”

Execmgr.log contained the following:

File C:\Windows\SysWOW64\CCM\Cache\…\lpksetup.exe is not a valid executable file
Invalid executable file lpksetup.exe

I altered the program command line to directly reference the executable at %WinDir%\System32\lpksetup.exe with the same result.

Since ConfigMgr executes from a 32-bit process I launched a 32-bit command prompt (C:\Windows\SysWOW64\cmd.exe) to manually try the lpksetup command line.

C:\Windows\SysWOW64>C:\Windows\System32\lpksetup.exe /?
'C:\Windows\System32\lpksetup.exe' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

C:\Windows\SysWOW64>dir C:\Windows\System32\lpksetup.exe
Volume in drive C is OSDisk
Volume Serial Number is 1234-5678

Directory of C:\Windows\System32

File Not Found

It turns out that lpksetup.exe on Windows 7 64-bit is a 64-bit-only process so with WOW file redirection in a 32-bit process C:\Windows\System32 redirects to C:\Windows\SysWOW64, which does not contain lpksetup.exe.  So I altered the ConfigMgr program command line to:

%WinDir%\SysNative\lpksetup.exe /i de-DE /p . /r /s

Using the SysNative alias allowed the language pack to be successfully installed on Windows 7 64-bit from a ConfigMgr advertised program.