Best Practices

How could anyone possibly know what's causing your issue? We know *nothing* about how your machine's configured, what other software is on it and so on.

I think we *can* deduce, though, that you're not using a virtual machine of any kind which, for a packager, is probably the biggest mistake you can make. Unless, of course, you're really into wasting hours and hours while your packaging machine is rebuilt? So...

- get plenty of disk space
- get as much RAM as you can afford
- rebuild your box
- get some virtualisation software. I use VirtualBox but, depending on your Microsoft licensing, you may have access to HyperV.
- create one "server" (i.e. a workstation which you'll use as a personal "server"), plus one or two packaging VMs and two testing VMs
- install SQL Server Express on your "server". This will host the application database for AS
- install AS on your packaging VM(s)
- create a local packaging account and two local test user accounts on all the VMs
- obtain the SysInternals suite of programs. If you don't have these - in particular ProcMon - you may as well give up doing any kind of support work.
- perform your usual desktop customisations
- if the host machine is on a domain and/or your VMs will need access to that domain, remember to disable machine account password changes. Google for how and why.
- save a snapshot
- start work

Build the IRP into an ISM first, them create the MSI from that.

I found the same issue you had years ago, it never used to handle massive reg keys in the capture. If you wanted to check if this is your cause...
Take a COPY of the Standard.nir. keep it somewhere safe. Then take out pretty much everything and leave just one or two keys, just as a test.

Try building the ISM. If it does work, you know you have an issue with the reg keys. Excluding the reg keys in the IRP does not work. You have to actually remove the sections of the registry in the NIR file.

If it still doesnt work, then you likely have a file issue.
Since you mentioned that you have a failure when trying ALL apps, I doubt its a file thing.
But I have seen in the past when an app has a bad file size or too many languages and InstallShield doesnt like it. That's actually easy to discover, as the ISM will be built, but it will be missing a heap of files. Just check what was the last file added to the ISM, then next file in the INC is the one that has the issue. Remove that line, rebuild the project, then add the single file later on.