These dialog boxes are driving me nuts these few days. These dialogs were seen when installing or uninstalling programs. I am very sure that a particular ill-written program is causing this problem.
Google says it is related to installshield. But all information available on the internet does not help. There is no way to recover from the problem. I have re-installed Windows XP countless number of times in order to find out details of the problem.
I am now pretty sure that this error occur after installing Microsoft Applocale.
Update : The solution that I found to resolve this problem is to remove the following registry entry.
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Custom\MSIEXEC.EXE
Microsoft Applocale added the above registry entry. I am not sure how is it used, but removing it does not seems cause any other side effect so far.