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Dragon Naturally Speaking Error: "Error opening installation log file"

Sat, 01/05/2008 - 17:48 — lee

I've just received Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 from Nuance. It's reputedly the best speech recognition software on the market. But, there's a problem:

It won't install.

"No problem", I thought. I'll just Google for the answer. It'll turn up the link that fixes what must be a very common problem. No such luck. Not only that, but it'll cost me at least $10 to even report to Nuance that there's a problem with their software.

So, I'm reporting the error here in hopes of finding a solution. When I do, I'll post it here, and maybe Google will pick it up and other people won't be in this predicament in the future.

Here are the details:

I put the Dragon Naturally Speaking CD into the drive, it starts the Windows Installer, and then I get the message "Error opening installation log file. Verify that the specified log file location exists and is writable."

Unfortunately, neither that phrase, nor any significant part of that phrase is found in Google, and it's not covered on the Nuance website's Knowledge Base.

Stay tuned. I'll report the solution here when I find it.

Comments

Thu, 01/17/2008 - 14:38 — lee

It's Really Good!

After setting up the software and running through the training exercises, it seems to work really well. This should be great software for anyone whose typing, spelling, or grammar skills aren't the best. It will determine the correct form of "your" and "their" and "it's", thus avoiding some of the most common grammatical mistakes.

It's important to speak clearly, but it's very fast and very accurate. The most difficult part for me is learning to speak in complete sentences.

Definitely a must-have for a lot of people who clearly don't have it.

Sat, 01/05/2008 - 18:09 — lee

Solution Found

That didn't take long. A look in the Event Viewer was all it took. I had disabled the Universal Plug and Play Device Host years ago for security reasons. There didn't seem to be any software that needed it.

All I needed to do was switch it back to Automatic. Here's the procedure, in case this sounds like gibberish:

Click Start, then Run.
Type services.msc in the box and hit Enter.
Scroll down the list of services until you find Universal Plug and Play Device Host
Double-click it.
In the Startup type box, select Automatic.
Click OK.
Close services.msc.