14 DAY TRIAL // This morning, Microsoft rolled out a total of 8 security updates to patch Windows, Internet Explorer, and Office security flaws, and it appears that at least one of the fixes is causing issues on some computers.
KB2952664 reportedly fails to install on Windows 7 computers, and although the company hasn’t confirmed the issues until now, quite a lot of users who turned to online forums said that they experienced the same behavior after installation.
At this point, it appears that the update fails to install with error code 80242016, and Windows 7 is the only affected version of the operating system.
In fact, KB2952664 is an update that’s only aimed at Windows 7 PCs, so in case you’re running Vista, Windows 8 or 8.1, you’re on the safe side for now.
Compatibility update for upgrading Windows 7
The KB2952664 is labeled by Microsoft as a “compatibility update for upgrading Windows 7” and is aimed at computers running Windows 7 Enterprise, Windows 7 Home Basic, Windows 7 Home Premium, Windows 7 Professional, Windows 7 Starter, and Windows 7 Ultimate with Service Pack 1 installed.
According to Microsoft itself, “this update helps the company make improvements to the current operating system in order to ease the upgrade experience to the latest version of Windows,” so the patch comes to make sure that the upgrade to Windows 8, 8.1, or even 10 Preview runs smoothly.
As you might have heard, Windows 7 users are also allowed to upgrade to Windows 10 Preview directly via Windows Update, so this revised version of the patch could come to fix any experienced issues.
How to fix it
Some of the users who experienced this issue told us that the only way to solve the problem was to remove any previously installed version of the KB2952664 update, reboot the computer, and then install the new release via Windows Update.
Some, however, decided to hide the update temporarily until Microsoft comes up with a fix, but since the company is yet to release a statement on this, it’s hard to say whether this revised patch will come sooner or later.
The bigger problem is that a number of users can’t find the patch in the installed Windows Update list, so it’s practically impossible to remove the previous version.
And still, since it’s just a patch supposed to make it easier to upgrade to a newer Windows version, you can very well ignore the error and skip the update completely for now.
Update: here's a detailed tutorial on how to fix the KB2952664 installation error.