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
    2014-09-05T21:09:50+00:00

    If and when I can replicate, I certainly will.  Doesn't replicate for us with unsigned MSI's.  However, the installing user is always privileged for us because the majority of our products are WCF services and the like.

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-09-05T21:01:33+00:00

    Can you get a log and post it to a onedirive public folder?

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-09-05T21:00:31+00:00

    Get a copy of the windowsupdate.log and a cbs.log and post it somewhere I can take a look if you want some help. make sure you get a failed attempt logged then get the logs right away so the good data doesn't get pushed back to one of the split logs

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  4. Anonymous
    2014-09-05T20:51:20+00:00

    We're doing some testing.  So far, the failure does not replicate for us with signed MSI's and/or Burn bootstrappers.  Testing the unsigned and then the Closed Environment cases next.  From what I have seen, install or upgrade is not possible if the error occurs.  The only remediation is to remove the update.

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  5. Anonymous
    2014-09-05T10:12:56+00:00

    I have Windows 7 Professional and had the same issues, except that the installer would simply not progress beyond a certain point. Gave it four or five minutes each time. A few times, I used system restore to fix my computer, then I uninstalled KB2918614 and the other security patches from 8/14 and everything worked fine again.

    I marked the security patches as hidden. When I have more time to waste, I will go back and install the other patches and updates one at a time.

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