Issue:
When attempting to install Inventor Nastran, the install will consistently fail regardless of the version. This happened to me on a brand-new system, and it took quite some time to track down the root cause since the error that was shown was the ever useful “1603 Install Failed” error. I tried versions 2020-2023, and all failed with the same error.
The truly confounding aspect was that none of my teammates had this issue, and we all receive the same base build of laptop when we upgrade, so I had expected installation results consistent with those of my teammates. Since that was not the case, it was obvious that the issue was specific to my system.
Causes:
Since the log files only included the generic 1603 Error, I finally contacted Autodesk to see if they could help get to the bottom of the mystery. Long story short, the development team had to get involved. Since they had not seen an issue like this, we had to get granular with the troubleshooting. Since all other Autodesk products installed without issue, and as a support specialist I have quite a variety of Autodesk software installed, we began looking at installation components that are specific to Nastran.
Finally, after manually running some of the installation batch files from an administrative command prompt, we were able to get the following error: “There is no script engine for file extension “.vbs”
It turns out that the root cause was another program which had taken the “.vbs” association from the system default.
Solution:
Fortunately, I was able to search on that particular error and found a thread where someone else had gotten the exact same message, only on a completely unrelated software. Even though the thread seemed unrelated, one of the suggestions in the thread turned out to be the solution.
In my case it was Notepad++ which had the “.vb” and “.vbs” file extensions registered to it. To correct the issue, I just had to remove the file association from Notepad++. You will need to run Notepad++ as an administrator so you can make the required changes.
- In Notepad++ (run as administrator) go to: Settings -> Preferences. From the Preferences list, choose “File Association”
- Choose “Property Script” from the “Supported Extensions” list
- The “Registered Extensions” list is sorted alphabetically, so find “.vbs,” select it, then use the left arrow (<-) to remove it from the list of “Registered Extensions”
- Once the “.vbs” extension is shown in the middle column, as in the image below, I would suggest closing Notepad++ and performing a reboot before attempting to install any version of Nastran.
If you have difficulty with the process indicated above, the following link has additional suggestions for alternate methods to change the file association so feel free to see what works best for you. Hopefully, this post will save you some time and frustration.
For your reference:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17757248/error-there-is-no-script-engine-for-file-extension-vbs-when-using-git-bash
