Hi Robert,
We seem to be having a very similar issue. Our installs would randomly fail with error code 1603 and an error message about a fault in Set-up.dat. Failure rate was near 95% on our 900 machines. Adobe Support and Karl having been looking into our issues but so far no solution has been found.
Having done a lot of investigating we've managed to deploy our package using a schedule task running as a domain admin. This is a nasty solution and we don't intend on using this permanently, but we needed to get the package out.
Are you seeing any of the following:
Entries in PDApp.log:
[FATAL] | | ASU | DeploymentManager | DeploymentManager | | | 2900 | The Bootstrapper Process is (5).Stopping the installation process.
[FATAL] | | ASU | DeploymentManager | DeploymentManager | | | 2900 | The return code from the Adobe Installer Process is (33).Stopping the uninstallation process.
[WARN] | | ASU | DeploymentManager | DeploymentManager | | | 2900 | Failed to find the pdb database.
[WARN] | | ASU | DeploymentManager | DeploymentManager | | | 2900 | Failed to get the local payload database handle.
Event Log:
Faulting application name: Set-up.dat, version: 2.9.1.474, time stamp: 0x54e11f94
Faulting module name: Set-up.dat, version: 2.9.1.474, time stamp: 0x54e11f94
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x000d7c52
Faulting process id: 0xb40
Faulting application start time: 0x01d072a073861622
Faulting application path: \\server.name.path\Adobe CC\FullPackage\Build\ASU\Set-up.dat
Faulting module path: \\server.name.path\Adobe CC\FullPackage\Build\ASU\Set-up.dat
Report Id: c86d9216-de93-11e4-8284-782bcb99e284
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:
Installer Log
Indicates it can't find the Media_db. We noticed that the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\caps doesn't get created on the machines were the install fails, so error message is correct in that there isn't a Media_db.db. Sysinterals Process Monitor seems to show that the setup tried to create the folder/files but they don't actually get created. Copying a Media_db into the folder from another machine seems to allow the installation to almost finish, but unsurprisingly you end up with problems later on.