Thanks Richard On each reinstall I deleted all residual directories. BUT I have solved the problem. After uninstall I searched the registry for references to LyX and Miktex and found a few. I couldn't delete them, I think because I am on a work computer and everything is locked down. I did notice references to Miketx 2.9 and also to mpm.exe, the package manger.
So I decided to reinstall the LyX package and change the directory name for Miktex from ../Miktex 2.9 to ../Miktex ignoring the note from the Lyx installer not to change any Miktex defaults. This worked. There is an article on this problem at http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/97296/lyx-miktex-installation-problems-on-windows-7 Regards On Thu, Aug 4, 2016 at 6:23 AM, Richard Heck <rgh...@lyx.org> wrote: > On 08/02/2016 09:30 PM, Mark Kortink wrote: > > Hi. I had LyX 2.2.0 (LyX-220-Bundle-3) running on a brand new Win 7 laptop > but for various reasons to do with not being able to generate pdfs and > missing .sty files I decided to uninstall and reinstall. > > > > The 2.2.0 reinstallation then failed on several attempts, so I tried > uninstalling that and installing 2.1.4 (LyX-2.1.4-Bundle-1) downloaded from > LyX.org. Same problem. What happens is > > 1) LyX seems to be installing fine, gets to the point where it says to > install Miktex, that seems to be installing fine as well. > > 2) The MikTex install seems to almost run to the end then fails with > “The operation failed for some reason” message. > > 3) Clicking OK there is an Miktex install failed message. > > 4) Clicking OK there is a “No LaTeX distribution could be found” > message . > > 5) LyX tries to abort but hangs when it tries to delete the main LyX > directory. > > > The error log which I assume is recording what happened at step 2 above > says:- > > 2016-08-03 11:12:28,372+1000 INFO initexmf - starting: MiKTeX > Configuration Utility 2.9.5900 (MiKTeX 2.9) > > 2016-08-03 11:12:28,388+1000 INFO initexmf - Removing fndb > (C:\ProgramData\MiKTeX\2.9)... > > 2016-08-03 11:12:28,388+1000 FATAL initexmf - Windows API error 32: The > process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process. > > 2016-08-03 11:12:28,388+1000 FATAL initexmf - Info: > path="C:\ProgramData\MiKTeX\2.9\miktex/data/le\1756f6ade37d5f870f23c05a7f81e257.fndb" > > 2016-08-03 11:12:28,388+1000 FATAL initexmf - Source: > Libraries\MiKTeX\Core\File\win\winFile.cpp > > 2016-08-03 11:12:28,388+1000 FATAL initexmf - Line: 286 > > > This is a "clean" install in the sense I have done unistalls and > reinstalls of the package and haven't fiddled with anything. I do not know > what process might be locking a needed file. > > > I am not on Windows, so I doubt I can be very helpful. But one thing you > might try is manually deleting the directory C:\ProgramData\MiKTeX\2.9\. > It's possible there is a some file in there that is somehow locked. > > Richard > >
