How to solve the problem with missing market app on Cyanogen 7.1 on HTC Desire

Background

I have two HTC Desire Bravo phones http://www.cyanogenmod.com/devices/htc-desire-gsm. I recently bought the second one rooted and ran http://revolutionary.io/ to get s-off. I installed Cyanogen 7.1 http://download.cyanogenmod.com/get/update-cm-7.1.0-Desire-signed.zip and the Google apps 20110828 http://goo-inside.me/gapps/gapps-gb-20110828-signed.zip. Everything went fine and the phone was up and running perfectly on the first try.

Since this went fine I decided to reinstall my other phone too. I recently bought Tasker http://goo.gl/tQopc and it refused to work because of a missing Google maps file and a reinstall should fix that problem.

The Problem

The only difference was that I had already applied S-off from Alpharev 1.7 on this phone. I took a nandroid backup of my already working 7.1 installation(upgraded from 7.0). I wiped the phone and tried installing 7.1 from scratch.

Installation went fine no error messages. The problems started when I tried to reboot in to the freshly installed Cyanogen. I got stuck with a boot loop and the loading screen never went away. I thought it had something to do with Alpharev 1.7 so I tried installing http://revolutionary.io/ on this phone too. When doing so I was prompted with a message about that my phone was already in S-off mode. Still it let me install the modified recovery tool that comes with http://revolutionary.io/.

After another wipe and clean install of 7.1, this time together with the Google apps I was able to get in to the OS.

Now the real problems started. Everything looked fine but when I ran the initial Android/Google setup wizard it always stopped with this error com.teamdouche.pacman has crashed. I tried several combinations of ticking only certain apps to be installed. Nothing helped and I always ended up with perfectly installed Cyanogen 7.1 but there was no market app available. This rendered the phone pretty useless.

The Solution

In the end I got the idea to try the upgrade path instead since it had worked before.

So here is how to solve the problem:

1. Take a nandroid backup of your working system before starting 
2. Download Cyanogen zip file for 7.0 http://download.cyanogenmod.com/get/update-cm-7.0.0-Desire-signed.zip
3. Download Google apps version 20110307 Universal using the Rom Manager http://goo.gl/QjhTl
4. Put all the zip files on the sd card 
5. Factory reset the phone 
6. Now flash the Cyanogen 7.0 zip file 
7. Now flash the 20110307 Google Apps 
8. Reboot in to Cyanogen 
9. Go through the initial setup Wizard, this will work without you getting the annoying com.teamdouche.pacman crash. 
10. Check that the market app is there and working(some of your apps might be missing at this time but that is not a problem they will reappear later) 
11. Now go in to Rom Manager and download Cyanogen 7.1 and choose to install and wipe Dalvik cache 
12. Reboot in to Cyanogen and go in to the Rom Manager again 
13. Find the Google apps 20110828 and install them without the experimental gchat features. 
14. The next time you boot in to Cyanogen You will have to go through the installation wizard again and you should have a fully working Cyanogen 7.1 

This was a bit of hard work finding out but it has been working fine ever since the upgrade to 7.1. I don't know what causes this problem or why but following the instructions above should fix it.

I hope it will save someone some time fiddling with this...