Errors involving iertutil.dll and/or normaliz.dll
There have been several complaints in the Internet Explorer general newsgroups about error messages stating that iertutil.dll and/or normaliz.dll are missing. Numerous programmes are also failing to run and the PCs in question are in quite a bad state.
Some attention is being paid to update 922880 (a fix related to IE7 Beta 3 and the Yahoo Toolbar), the theory seeming to be:
1) IE7 Beta 3 installer downloads and installs 922880 *before* the primary IE7 installation begins
2) IE7 Beta 3 install then fails because of registry permissions errors
3) 922880 cannot be uninstalled when IE7 Beta 3 fails (with some believing that the iertutil.dll and/or normaliz.dll errors are occurring because 922880 remains on the system despite IE7 Beta 3 not being there).
Specifically, it is has been said that "Upon reboot of the computer you start getting lots of error messages with IERTUTIL.DLL. You are no longer able to use IE6, System Restore, Windows Search, Outlook (and express) and MS Money to name a few. It's suspected that the update KB922880 is actually installing and not uninstalling when the overall install of IE7 Beta 3 fails."
and
"A buggy software update has been added to the downloand and prevents IE7 from installing. Unfortunately, the IE7 download deletes iertutil.dll and leaves you high and dry (and probably anyone else with XP Home SP2 who has downloaded today)."
The fix mentioned is to edit the registry permissions for HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT and reinstall IE7 Beta 3.
Following is my thinking, which leads me to suspect that 922880 is not the cause of the errors people are seeing, and revolves around my understanding that there are two distinct times when Windows Updates may be installed during the installation of IE7 Beta 3 - before the install of IE7 Beta 3 itself and afterwards. If that basic premise is incorrect, then we can probably forget about the rest of this blog post 
I suspect that the iertutil.dll and normaliz.dll errors are not caused by the installation (and/or failed removal) of 922880 but rather by the primary failure of the IE7 installation itself.
A big reason for my doubting that 922880 is involved is because this problem seems to pre-date the patch - unfortunately nobody seems to have posted PRECISE error message texts, but errors involving iertutil.dll and/or normaliz.dll being missing were also reported back during the IE7 Beta 2 Preview and even earlier - you'll find a mention of it back in February on the Aquasoft forums - you'll also see that in this instance the problems started occurring after FlyaKiteOSX was uninstalled:
http://www.aqua-soft.org/board/showthread.php?t=32809&page=2
And in internetexplorer.general:
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.internetexplorer.general/browse_frm/thread/99dfb45b9662185e/92b73dfb91fdb84f?lnk=st&q=&rnum=9&hl=en#92b73dfb91fdb84f
In both cases, no precise diagnosis was reported. The developer of FlyaKiteOSX points out that his programme does not touch the two files in question (just like 922880 does not seem to do so), so what could else could be going wrong?
Let's have a closer look at the installation process:
1) The typical log will show (note: the numbers at the beginning of each line may change):
00:04.781: INFO: EULA Accepted
00:05.547: INFO: WGA Validation started
00:08.156: INFO: WGA Check Succeeded
00:13.734: INFO: Options selected:
00:13.797: INFO: [X] Download & install updates and MRT
<<this is when pre-install Internet Explorer Updates are installed, then the MSRT runs>>
<snip>
01:17.609: INFO: |Running MRT >>> Malicious Software Removal Tool execution completed successfully,
<<then we get into the nitty gritty of installing IE7 Beta 3 itself>>
<snip>
01:49.375: INFO: |Inst. Pre-Progs. >>> xmllitesetup.exe installation completed successfully, exitresult=0x00000000, exitcode=0x00000000
<snip>
04:16.844: INFO: |Inst. IE >>> Internet Explorer installation completed successfully, exitresult=0x00000000,
<<this is when I understand post-install updates are installed including, I assume, 922880>>
<<we then go through some final checks, the installation is judged finished and the user is prompted to reboot>>
2) If I am reading the update.inf for 922880 correctly the patch shouldn't be installed or removed unless iexplore.exe is greater than or equal to 7.0.5450.4, or less than or equal to 7.0.5451.0:
[Prerequisite]
condition=CompositeOp,OrOp,Test.Install.Section
[Test.Install.Section]
AndOp=Test.IE7Installed.Section
SingleOp=Test.IE7SetupRunning.Section
Display_String="%InvalidIEVersion%"
[Test.IE7Installed.Section]
GreatOrEqualOp=CheckFileVer,Test.InternetExplorer.Files,iexplore.exe,>=,7.0.5450.4
LessOp=CheckFileVer,Test.InternetExplorer.Files,iexplore.exe,<,7.0.5451.0
[Test.IE7SetupRunning.Section]
EqualOp=CheckReg,HKLM,"SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Setup\7.0_Beta2\WU","ForcePostUpdateInstall",0x10001,"==",1
[Prerequisite.Uninstall]
condition=SingleOp,Test.IE7Installed.Section
[Test.IE7Installed.Section.Uninstall]
GreatOrEqualOp=CheckFileVer,Test.InternetExplorer.Files,iexplore.exe,>=,7.0.5450.4
LessOp=CheckFileVer,Test.InternetExplorer.Files,iexplore.exe,<,7.0.5451.0
Display_String="%InvalidIEVersionUninstall%"
Therefore, if 922880 is downloaded and installed as part of IE7 Beta 3, it would need to be a Post-IE Beta 3 install update.
3) Here are the entire contents of the 922880 update - note that iertutil.dll and normaliz.dll are not there.
spmsg.dll
spuninst.dll
urlmon.dll
eula.txt
update.exe
update.ver
kb922880.cat
update.inf
updspapi.dll
update.inf also makes no mention of our two problem files (iertutil.dll and normaliz.dll), therefore we can assume that the update does not do anything to them.
4) iertutil.dll and normaliz.dll are copied over as part of the IE7 Beta 3 install itself.
5) The error message "Setup has detected that Windows Internet Explorer has been upgraded on your computer since KB922880 was installed. If you remove KB922880 your system will be unusable. The removal of KB922880 cannot continue." is tied to error "InvalidIEVersionUninstall" which in turn relates to the iexplore.exe version check.
Ok, so what does all that confusing information tell us?
A. The error message being seen when attempting to remove 922880 is expected behaviour if the version of iexplore.exe is not greater than or equal to 5450.4 or less than 7.0.5451.0
B. Errors involving iertutil.dll and/or normaliz.dll occurred *before* the release of 922880.
C. A failed installation and/or removal of 922880 may *not* be the cause of the iertutil.dll and/or normaliz.dll errors.
D. Adjusting the registry key permissions as noted has fixed the iertutil.dll and normaliz.dll errors for some people because it allows IE7 to be properly installed. The stated fix, courtesy of "Ray" is:
Right click on "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT" and select 'permissions'. A permissions window will now open, you should see just the word "Everyone". Click on 'Add...". Now type the word Administrator in the box and click on 'Check Names'. Once that is done click on 'ok'
Now, click on the word "Administrator" so it's blue and put a check in 'full control' and click 'apply' and 'ok'. You may get the hourglass for a minute here. Once that is done, close down registry editor.
Now run the installer for IE7 Beta 3, making sure to uncheck the box that "updates" the installation. Upon sucessfull installation, you will reboot your computer to find that everything works just fine."
I don't have the brainpower to take this any further and explain exactly how/why things are going wrong with iertutil.dll and normaliz.dll - I need the IE team to help with that.
That being said, I would be very interested to see the contents of the ie7beta3_main.log from any system still affected by the iertutil.dll and/or normaliz.dll errors *before* any attempt is made to fix the problems.