Flash 9.0.16, Windows Installer 1603 error and oleaut32.dll
This may be old news, but it was new knowledge for me. In troubleshooting why ~1% of the deployments of the latest Flash, 9.0.16.0, was erroring with 1603 error messages, I found this fix in a google search "Reregister some system .Dlls". They listed several, but the one that worked for me was to re-register oleaut32.dll.
I ran a psexec remotely against the 30 boxes to silently reregister oleaut32.dll (psexec.exe \\machine name regsvr32 OleAut32.dll -s), sent a re-run the advertisement to the machines that reported a 1603, and they all ran successfully.
I verified that worked by first doing just a couple; try to rerun the ad (fails w/1603), remotely reregister, and rerun again; all within the space a few minutes. That pretty much decided it for me that it was re-registering that .dll.
So my failure stat has dropped from 1.3% failures to .5% failures (some of those boxes have gone home for the weekend--I'll have to catch up on them next week); but I really really like <1% failure!