InstallAware

Recently my installation of InstallAware stopped being able to merge with 64 bit merge modules in any way. I tried a few things, none of which worked. So I tried to 'Repair' Installaware - that left it totally broken, the main .exe is gone. Then I tried 'uninstall', that fails with can't find $WINDOWSINSTALLERDIR$. I tried to 'add/remove features' also, this also fails and still there is no main .exe and the program isn't working at all.

Any ideas? Any help at all? I posted when I ran into the first problem about not being able to merge with x64 merge modules, no answer on that.

I rebooted to safe mode, ran msiexec /regserver
Just in case and am re-trying again in case it is msiexec that is somehow messed up.

many many registry entries have no permissions assigned to them. I seem to have to go into the registry and take ownership and assign permissions, then maybe I'll have a chance for the install to work again. It's a subkey of a key in subkey of user components that starts with a guid of c5e3. All of them are bad.

After manually fixing up all these registry keys (there are a lot) I was finally able to re-install installaware.

so there must be more registry entries that are bad.
I can't run the licensing tool (no feedback except it doesn't think I have IA installed). I try to build a project get an error:
Cleared output folder ...
Error during build: Access violation at address 00000000. Read of address 00000000