Oracle Database Discussions

Greetings -

I'm trying to install the 32bit oracle 11g database client on Win 7 Professional x64. I'm stuck with this error when the installer gets to the "Perform Prerequisite Checks" step:

Environment variable: "PATH" - This test checks whether the length of the environment variable "PATH" does not exceed the recommended length.
Details:
- PRVF-3919 : Failed to retrieve value of environment variable "PATH"
- Cause: Environment variable value could not be determined.
- Action: Check user equivalence and whether the user has administrative privileges on the node.

Google tells me this might be related to an excessive PATH environment variable length, so I made multiple repetitions of "clean some crap out and try to install again" with no effect. Currently it is set to:
C:\>path
PATH=C:\Windows\system32;C:\Windows;

And the installer still fails.

I've tried explicitly running the installer via "Run as Administrator" and as a regular user (who is in the Administrators group). No change either way.

Someone on my team suggested making sure the installation target path has no spaces in it. I'm keeping the default path suggested by the installer, which is
D:\app\ladams\product\11.2.0\client_1

where ladams is my Windows user name. I did some experimentation here, changing the install path to things like "D:\oracle" and that hasn't resolved the issue.

Interestingly, if I open the installer log, I can find this line in it near the top:
INFO: PATH has :==>C:\Users\ladams\AppData\Local\Temp\OraInstall2013-01-28_02-19-03PM\jdk\jre\bin;C:\Windows\system32;C:\Windows;C:\Windows\system32;C:\Windows;;;.

So it can apparently read the path at some point before the pre-requisite check, although it seems to be doubling up the contents for some reason...

Later on in the log file, I see this:
INFO: -----------------------------------------------
INFO: *********************************************
INFO: Environment variable: "PATH": This test checks whether the length of the environment variable "PATH" does not exceed the recommended length.
INFO: Severity:CRITICAL
INFO: OverallStatus:OPERATION_FAILED
INFO: -----------------------------------------------

Is there some way to work around this issue, or just skip the prerequisites check entirely? I found something on a blog via google about being able to pass a "-ignoreSysPrereqs" switch to the installer to bypass the check. When I tried that, the installer still performed it's checks, and failed with the same error, so apparently that was bad info...

Any help would be appreciated.