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
    2014-09-04T14:13:55+00:00

    Sounds like there is an issue with the method that updates are being installed. The update that is breaking future updates was a patch to thort the possibility that an attacker could elevate permissions incorrectly and perform an illegal repair action on a installation. I assume that they could also perform a illegal update action too except other security measures would stop it so it wasn't a threat.

    My guess is either there is a previous update that needs to be repaired, perhaps one of the two that were recalled and rereleased recently is noticing a mismatch that the windows installer failed to see before the update and the method of installation is not correct. Or, less likely, something is trying to piggy back of an install and is causing a failure due to a security violation. I would contact support. They offer free update help

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-09-04T13:55:11+00:00

    Same problem here with KB2918614 ! Since it's installed on computers (Windows 7 x64) i can't install anymore MSI files remotely through powershell...

    Here is the error message : 

    "The requested operation cannot be completed. The computer must be trusted for delegation and the current user account must be configured to allow delegation."

    Once i uninstalled the KB all is working fine. 

    Help needed ! I can't uninstall KB2918614 on all computers...

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-09-04T13:32:23+00:00

    Please see the Windows installer XML mailing lists on this topic, archived on nabble here

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  4. Anonymous
    2014-09-04T13:28:44+00:00

    Yes, I an curious what those three users have in common? Have you checked the windowsupdate.log or CBS.log? There is a cause for concern when a security update is released and it only effects a small number of computers. Of course there is the chance it is not a security issue but, still, the issue should be looked into. If a different user created the keys or the keys were imported over from a different user then you could get this error because there wouldn't be access to the keys and decryption would fail. Something worth looking into. The correct place to report this to is http://support.microsoft.com/contactus/?ws=support

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  5. Anonymous
    2014-09-04T13:21:37+00:00

    DanzIZme: - In my particular case we've had 3 reports of this problem in the past few weeks (from about 40 or so sales). So it doesn't happen for everyone. The specific message is "key not valid for use in specific state". I haven't been able to reproduce the problem on any of my own machines (a combination of Win7 / Win8.1 / 32-bit / 64-bit).

    But I guess 3 users can't all be imagining it.!

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