"Marshal data too short" error message when installing watir-webdriver on Windows XP

Question

I have a clean install of Windows XP (Professional, Version 2002, Service Pack 3) in a VMware Fusion virtual machine (3.1.2 332101). (MacBook Pro host computer, Mac OS 10.6.7.) The XP installation has 512 MB of RAM and is fully updated, except that I left Internet Explorer in version 6.

I installed Ruby and RubyGems:

C:\Documents and Settings\zeljko>gem env RubyGems Environment: - RUBYGEMS VERSION: 1.6.2 - RUBY VERSION: 1.8.7 (2011-02-18 patchlevel 334) [i386-mingw32] - INSTALLATION DIRECTORY: C:/Ruby187/lib/ruby/gems/1.8 - RUBY EXECUTABLE: C:/Ruby187/bin/ruby.exe - EXECUTABLE DIRECTORY: C:/Ruby187/bin - RUBYGEMS PLATFORMS: - ruby - x86-mingw32 - GEM PATHS: - C:/Ruby187/lib/ruby/gems/1.8 - C:/Documents and Settings/zeljko/.gem/ruby/1.8 - GEM CONFIGURATION: - :update_sources => true - :verbose => true - :benchmark => false - :backtrace => false - :bulk_threshold => 1000 - REMOTE SOURCES: - http://rubygems.org/ 

When I try to install the watir-webdriver gem, I get this error message:

 C:\Documents and Settings\zeljko>gem install watir-webdriver ERROR: While executing gem ... (ArgumentError) marshal data too short 

I am looking, but have not yet found a solution.

Answer 1

jarib suggested I delete the .gem folder ( C:\Documents and Settings\zeljko\.gem ) and fix the problem.

Answer 2

If the problem remains

Reinstall all the gems:

 sudo gem list | cut -d" " -f1 > gem_list.txt cat gem_list.txt | xargs sudo gem uninstall -aIx cat gem_list.txt | xargs sudo gem instal 

Answer 3

Delete the .gem folder in a hidden directory.