Don’t you just love error messages!
I was trying to install Shockwave 10.2 from, firstly, the usual web-type link and then by running Shockwave_Installer_Slim.exe. The install fails with: “Could not load the DLL library…\Shockwave10\gi.dll. The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log for more detail.”
So I cranked up Vista’s Event Viewer for the first time. What a nightmare of complexity! I eventually found something under “Applications and Services Logs\Microsoft\Windows\UAC”. It occurred about 10 minutes before I found it so I assume it was caused by the web-link install attempt. There are no entries for the several manual installations I tried. I can’t find anything for them at all.