I found this tip on StackOverflow and wanted to mirror it here to go with my previous article on Java installs.

A Windows .reg file with

will make the installer “just install”, no questions asked, and no toolbars sneaking in.

Some downloads: A premade .reg file, and the .reg file renamed to .txt (in case browsers/virus scanners prevent the previous download). Always verify the contents of .reg files before running them.

I had a strange error after updating/rebooting a server yesterday: Management Studio popped up with the error above when I tried connecting to a server, and several other messages when trying to run queries.

After some unhelpful hints from other forums, I found the real solution/problem hidden in a post: My TEMP/TMP folder(s) didn’t exist.

For some reason my variables were set to:

After the update, this “1″ folder didn’t exist anymore. I could fixed this by editing the environment variables (right click Computer, Properties, Advanced, Environment Variables) and rebooting (since I didn’t know how many applications were using the wrong temporary folders).

Recently I had to uninstall Java from a computer that had 5 different versions installed, and after some searching, and more time spent trying and failing than it strictly would take to manually uninstall each version, I ended up with the following .cmd file:

It should be fairly obvious what these lines do, and how to extend it to uninstall other products, I think!

Bonus command line to silently install JRE without ASK toolbar:

Added 2013-06-22: See also this article on preventing Ask toolbar from installing.