KB2918614 breaks Windows Installer Service

Anonymous
2014-08-17T15:30:13+00:00

I didnt know where best to post a bug report about KB2918614.

This is for Windows 8.1 Pro

It appears on August 13 I received KB2918614 and immediately after I began having trouble with certain MSI installations, especially those that required any version of Visual C++ Redistributable to be installed.

Now, of course I have most of those already installed, but the install process of many programs runs those redistributables before the actual install runs.  It would always give me the error of "key not valid for use in specified state" and exit with a 1603 event.

I didnt know what caused the problem at the time and went through many troubleshooting steps including sfc/scannow, registry modifications (which have all been switched back to their original values), and attempts at re-installing the Windows Installer Service for Windows 8.1 (5.0) which apparently does not have its own redistributable install file.

Eventually I determined that I received a large number of updates on 8/13, so I removed them all.  This immediately fixed my problem.

As I didnt know if that was a fluke and I didnt know which specific update caused the problem, on reboot they all re-installed.

The problem returned as soon as I started back into windows.

I went through each of the knowledgebase articles and located KB2918614 as being the only one that modifies the MSI Windows installer service files.

I have now removed and hidden this update.

I wanted to notify Microsoft of this issue but did not know the best method to do so, so I am posting it in the Microsoft community in the event another user has the same problem as I did in order to work around it.

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Install and upgrade

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  1. Anonymous
    2014-08-21T10:40:51+00:00

    suffering from this on Windows 7 Professional SP1.

    Installs are "looping".

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-08-22T15:10:27+00:00

    I am using Windows 7 Ultimate wit SP1.

    After installing the update KB2918614, i had the same problem. I couldn't install or deinstall 64bit applications (error code 1719).

    After removing the update, i didn't have any problems!

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-08-29T03:00:50+00:00

    Windows 8.1 enterprise (64-bit) user here. Same experience. Installer refuses install anything, always quitting with that key invalid for use in specified state error message. Uninstalled this update after a google search found this thread and all installs work perfectly. (Until windows update reinstalls this update again...)

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  4. Anonymous
    2014-08-29T14:40:45+00:00

    I am seeing this also with just 1 machine so far. The error message in the logs reads.

     SECREPAIR: A general error running CryptAcquireContext

    MSI (s) (3C:10) [09:27:13:873]: SECREPAIR: Crypt Provider not initialized. Error:-2146893813

    When I uninstall the Patch the applications installs without a problem.

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  5. Anonymous
    2014-08-24T07:57:23+00:00

    I'd like to endorse this bug report. Our products get installed using InstallShield. Since 14th Aug 2014 we've had 3 reports from customers who can't run our installer any more. They get the same error message as reported above (key not valid for use in specific state). All three customers were using Windows 7, 64-bit.. They removed update KB2918614 and the installer magically started working again.

    Before reporting here, I tried to reproduce the problem locally but I couldn't reproduce it either on 32-bit or 64-bit Windows 7 (in both cases, the suspect update - KB2918614 - had been applied but on my machines, our installer worked as expected). So in other words, the bug seems to affect some Windows users but not others. I appreciate that this will make it difficult to track down - but it's a serious bug and needs urgent investigation!

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