This sometimes happens when the user does not have ''full'' rights on their PC in Windows 7.

Even with a rt-click ''Run as Administrator) when you launch IE, that may not give enough rights to install everything ALM wants to.

See if you can get your internal PC support/desk-side assistance to help with this by logging in as a ''real'' admin on the box and then to IE to get the client components to update (make sure to go all the way into a project to make sure it works). You might as well run the ''ALM Client Registration'' also - you may need it later.

Then, have the user log back in again as themselves and everything should work fine... until you patch again.

In my experience this occurs because the ALM Client Registration was previously run on the PC, and now that a patch has been applied to the server, the ALM Client Registration process needs to be run again. This will be an ongoing need for the PC; each time an ALM patch is installed on the server any PC that previously ran the ALM Client Registration will have to do so again. Each patch changes the OTAClient.dll version on the server. If that DLL has been registered on a client system, the ALM Login screen will find it and compare the versions. They must match.

Just using ALM does not register the DLL. This is done when the ALM Client Registration process specifically is run. That process should only need to be run on a system that is attempting to run some sort of integration with ALM, such as integrating other HP tools (i.e. Import from Excel, or QTP) or running a program written to utilize the OTA API.

If such integrations are not being run, and you don't want to have to deal with this problem every time you install an ALM patch, then you should run the process to ''clean'' the PC. Information on this process can be found in HP's knowledge base article http://support.openview.hp.com/selfsolve/document/KM176290

To Update the OTA client installed on the problematic machine using the following procedure:

1. Login to the machine as admin user
2. Open the IE browser,
3. connect to the ALM server ( http://''ALMPCPlatformServerName''/qcbin)
4. select the Add-Ins page
5. Select ''HP Quality Center Connectivity''
6. Download the Add-In
7. run the ''TDConnect.exe'' to update the OTA version

Then restart IE and login to ALM-PC

Thanks everyone,
Actually, we tried re-''Registering'' and re-running the Connectivity add-in already -- there was an issue with rights on my PC.

Finally when we had a systems guy log in to my PC as the ''real'' Administrator, they were able to get QC to update the client with the right versions of everything.
They said that even though it appeared that I had ''administrator'' level rights on my PC, even ''run as administrator'' for IE would not let me write to or delete from some of the folders QC wanted to use to update the client files.
Since he was sitting right here, we just had him login to get the install update over with.