Patch Error. Vista?

[usonian]

So a friend of mine who just started playing is having an issue running the latest patch (2.0.7).  He downloaded it (not from blizz) and gets an error when it tries to load that says it "cannot find wow.exe".  I gave him a copy of the patch from our site just to make sure he has a good one and it does the same thing.  He did just install Vista before this patch so I'm wondering if this has something to do with it.  The error suggests an uninstall/reinstall of wow but I'm not sure if this will fix the problem or if there is an easier fix.

Does anyone have experience with this error or know how to fix it?  I'd like to avoid driving out to his house after work today to try and fix it.  Here is a screenshot of the error.

Thanks guys.

[attach=#]

[Shadowwolf]

have him place the executable inside the WoW directory and try running it from there. If that doesnt work I need to know answers to the following:

1) Is this a fresh Vista install or an upgrade?

2) Is this 32 or 64 bit Vista?

3) What version of Vista is it?

4) Does WoW start up w/o the patch and let him login?

5) Does he have Burning Crusade Beta installed or perhaps an additional copy of WoW installed elsewhere?

[Shadowwolf]

Tell him to disable Norton AV during the install also...it sux

[usonian]

This is a fresh install of 32 bit Home Premium Vista.  He said WoW does load and let him log then it goes to download the update.

He's not sure if he has two copies of WoW since he did some copying over from his old system.  I told him to make sure he has only one copy, turn of Norton, then run the patch from the WoW folder.  I think he should be able to do this stuff on his own.

Thanks for the help, your an after-work traffic saver

[Shadowwolf]

The self installing patches try to locate WoW by searching the registry, if thats corrupted somehow (and a Windows migration or upgrade would do that 99.99999% of the time) then its not going to find it. Fortunately, Blizz got smart and will have the self installers search the directory they are run from also (unless they changed the EXE's again) and that should solve it. The installers also used to fix the registry entry for future executables to have an easier time, but again, depends if Blizz changed things or got lazy. Never can tell.

Thats basically the problem taking place based on those answers and the error. Worst case scenario is he will need to download the patch using the Blizz downloader and get to play again in 2010 sometime when WoW 2.1 is out.

[Genoism]

ya if he copied wow from his old windows to his new ones it'll break it im pretty sure....generally it breaks any program that uses the registry.