14 DAY TRIAL // The September 2014 Update Tuesday rollout is very close, but users are still having problems with patches released by the company last month.
KB2918614 appears to be one of the botched updates, as many reports published by users who installed it indicate some really unusual errors experienced when trying to install MSI files.
As Woody Leonhard of InfoWorld reports today, some of the errors that users are getting include “error 997.overlapped I/O operation in progress,” “key not valid for use in specific state,” and “SECREPAIR: A general error running CryptAcquireContext MSI (s) (3C:10) [09:27:13:873]: SECREPAIR: Crypt Provider not initialized. Error:-2146893813.”
Affecting both Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 Posts on Microsoft’s Community forums also confirm the issue, and at this point, it appears that the errors are only experienced on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 systems, with the latter being affected more than its predecessor.
Microsoft user Teriophage explained that KB2918614 was causing problems with installing MSI files on his Windows 8.1 Pro computer ever since mid-August, when Microsoft launched the updates.
“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,” he posted.
“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.”
How to fix the error
At this point, Microsoft is yet to deliver a fix, and no statements are available, which makes it almost impossible to determine whether the error is affecting a large number of computers or only specific configurations.
Removing the botched update seems to be pretty much the only option right now, at least until Microsoft comes up with a workaround. Users confirmed that uninstalling the KB2918614 bulletin was the only thing that worked.
“I didn’t 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,” the same user posted.
“Eventually I determined that I received a large number of updates on 8/13, so I removed them all. This immediately fixed my problem.”
To do this, you need to launch Control Panel, click on “Programs” and then select “View installed updates.” Look in the list for installed updates (you can search them by date), click on KB2918614 and hit “Uninstall.” Reboot your computer and everything should be working again.