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
    2014-10-01T15:06:01+00:00

    I thought when you run assoc .msi you didn't get any association for that file type. Maybe I misunderstood. Can you double check.

    I will look at it a little more and see what I can figure out

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-10-01T16:22:55+00:00

    I will look at it a little more and see what I can figure out

    Instead of  assoc  he could also use  Default Programs  (e.g. via Win-w)

    Control Panel\Programs\Default Programs\Set Associations

    Then sorting by Current Default it looks like we can also ask about  .msp 

    FWIW my impression is that often there are associations which the old assoc and ftype commands don't show but which do exist in the registry and so might be more exposed by the Default Programs tool.

    FYI

    Robert Aldwinckle

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-10-02T04:54:16+00:00

    Try this http://www.vindamedia.com/windows/help/windows-update-general-failure

    Might need to start your own thread since it sounds like yours is a different issue

    Thanks to DanzlZme for the suggestion & some repairs were made.

    Yet I am still unable to install .msi files or install Java.

    (sigh)

    Oh well a fix will come along some day  :).

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  4. Anonymous
    2014-10-04T16:58:56+00:00

    I face the same problem on my Samsung Smart PC pro running Win 8.1, 64 bit. Strangely, uninstalling the mentioned security update did not fix the problem for me. Hope a better fix comes along soon! This is surely something Microsoft should address as a matter of urgency.

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  5. Anonymous
    2014-10-04T17:29:31+00:00

                This is surely something Microsoft should address as a matter of urgency.

    You'd think so, wouldn't you - but the fix seems to be a long time coming :-(

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