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
    2014-10-11T00:43:12+00:00

    Uninstalling this update, and then "hiding" it has helped me.

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-10-09T16:42:53+00:00

    C:\Users\xxx\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA

    Delete content in the above location, and the problem will be resolved.

    Thank you very much user

    Notice who you replied to?   Poster  Aznarepse  deserves the credit for this discovery I think.   ; )

    Thanks for confirming the suggestion.

    Sorry...my bad!

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-10-09T16:38:18+00:00

    There may be a need to reboot if you want to install something else, for instance the msi database might end up where it needs a reboot to finish its process before it can be in a ready state.

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  4. Anonymous
    2014-10-09T05:37:45+00:00

    C:\Users\xxx\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA

    Delete content in the above location, and the problem will be resolved.

    Thank you very much user

    Notice who you replied to?   Poster  Aznarepse  deserves the credit for this discovery I think.   ; )

    Thanks for confirming the suggestion.

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  5. Anonymous
    2014-10-09T05:04:56+00:00

    C:\Users\xxx\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA

    Delete content in the above location, and the problem will be resolved.

    After reading a ton of materials, I can't believe this simple solution works beautifully for me. I did not even delete anything, just moved the entire folder under RSA folder to the desktop and boom...I can install any msi application. It's been a couple of months fighting with this ****. Thank you very much user Robert Aldwinckle!! You are the man sir.

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