Installing Oracle 10g

A couple of colleagues and I have had endless problems lately, trying to install Oracle 10g. It wasn't a problem with configuration, or any of those normal things - no, Oracle threw an exception in the middle of copying the files!

There were no useful error messages about the crash, nothing in the log files - VisualStudio's JIT Debugger just popped up with the message "An unhandled win32 exception occcurred in javaw.exe".

I googled and googled, and found some things about not having a space in the folder name that you're installing from; and potentially some problems about fonts; but nothing helped. After ages, I tried googling the stage it got to: "copying files for 'Oracle Universal Installer", and found the answer! We have archiving software called Zantaz on our machines, and that somehow interferes with the install. All you have to do is rename the easfa.dll to something like easfa.bak, then run the install. After it's installed succesfully (yay!) you can rename the dll back to its original name.

Since it took me a day of googling to find it, I thought I'd post about it with all the relevant keywords in the text, so as to help any others struggling with the same problem to find the solution :)