Java Error 1603

I was getting the error 1603 for a few months when trying to update Java.  Then I decided it was time to dig into the problem.

My google searches weren't helping. To me, spending more than 15-20 minutes is a long time to search because normally the search results I get back explain how to fix issues usually within a few minutes.  I had spent 40-45 minutes trying to fix my issue.

I'm using Windows 7 (it's a work machine). Normally when I try and pass the buck by asking our (outsourced) help desk for help on issues I have with my machine, they go down the wrong path and sometimes they cause more issues.

I tried many different suggestions but none seemed to work. I had high hopes for these suggestions but they didn't work either...

http://java.com/en/download/help/error_1603.xml

I ended up taking suggestions from different forum posts and performing them in a different order to solve my issue with updating Java.

I uninstalled Java and couldn't reinstall. Forum posts kept telling me to reboot and reinstall Java but that 1603 error kept coming up.  I tried the 32-bit and the 64-bit offline installers as well.  Because I had uninstalled Java and the error kept coming up during the install, in my mind, I didn't have any Java files on my machine at all.

I came across a forum post that suggested to do a Start-->javacpl.exe     That's when it clicked that maybe some files were either left behind or some files made it back onto my computer during my repeated reinstall attempts. The suggestion was to start the Java control panel, click on the Security tab and deselect "Enable Java content in the browser" option.

After I did that, I close the control panel and searched to see if I had left over files from the 64-bit version reinstall attempts I performed.  I didn't see any so I then tried to install the offline Java installer and it finally worked.  After the install completed, I went back into the Java control panel and re-enabled "Enable Java content in the browser" option.

SSRS adding extra page or white space when exporting to PDF

My employer has software that runs Crystal Reports (ver 9) out to PDF files every night to a shared network drive.  I've been tasked with converting all of those reports over to SSRS and by using the subscriptions to generate these reports. When I started with my first report and did an export out to a PDF file, it kept adding extra blank pages at the end.

Here are the specs of my environment...
1. SSRS 2008 (installed directly on the db server)
2. Report Builder 3.0
3. Windows 7 workstation

From previous experience I knew that I couldn't expand the body of the report out past a certain point but I couldn't remember what that was.  I expanded the width out to 8.5 and I didn't touch the margins.  After playing around with the margins and the body width, I found out that I had to take the body width and subtract that by both the left and right margins and if it was greater than 8.5, it was going to push white space onto a page that should show up to the side of it but it looked like the next page.

So, in short, to keep extra white space from showing up at the bottom of an SSRS report, take the body width subtract left margin subtract right margin which should be less than or equal to whatever you would be printing to...in my case to a PDF.