Having trouble installing WoW (Word of Warcraft) on your Windows Vista box? Well, I was. Recently I wanted to go back and give WoW a try once again, and by now I have a new machine from Alienware running Windows Vista. I popped the original first CD in and low and behold … I got an error, it wouldn’t run the executable. I got an error number 132 and something about a bootstrap problem.

I thought this might just be a problem with the older installer and Vista, since I got these disks years ago, so I downloaded the latest installer from Blizzard’s website. So, 3.5 GB later I try to install from the download and it doesn’t work either. Different error, this time Vista just popped up a box saying that the installer wasn’t working. Support at Blizzard was no help, in their opinion I had bad memory but I didn’t think that was the case since every other game I have runs great. After some log searching and Google-ing, I hit upon something that clicked for me. It seems the installer was failing because of a problem with the LAME MP3 codec. Aha!

The answer was there in front of me. I took a shot, downloaded and installed the LAME MP3 codec and tried again. Lookout, now the installer worked! I didn’t go back and try the old CD’s, but the installer that I downloaded worked great.

So, if you are having trouble installing WoW on your Vista box, and especially if you get any kind of LAME MP3 errors, go and download the codecs here (http://www.freecodecs.net/files/lameACM-3.97-final.zip) and see if that helps.