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
    2015-08-10T13:50:48+00:00

    Thank you for the detailed description and procedure.

    The Whitelisting is working and I successfully installed Visual Studio 2013.

    Thanks again for saving me much time.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-11-16T21:44:37+00:00

    actual mileage may vary...  I checked my [windows 7] updates and i don't even have KB2918614!

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-10-15T16:04:44+00:00

    Hello, I understand that deleting the KB.... fixed your problem but it does'nt show up in my downloads...in other words I cannot find it too delete.Any ideas?                   Thanks, Bill

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-10-17T19:29:38+00:00

    That was 2 years ago, sir. Please go to the top of the page, click on 'Participate' and then 'Ask a question' to ask your own question, then you can get help specific to your problem. Something that is years old may not be an issue anymore, even if the error message is the same.

    Thanks,

    David

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  5. Anonymous
    2017-03-09T07:49:38+00:00

    Thanks for sharing the question me too was suffering form the same problem now got my answer in these replies too https://goo.gl/Ca4oeX

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