After spending a large portion of the last two days troubleshooting some MSI installations while I continue to teach myself Software Packaging in the right way!, I came across a number of my MSI’s which were simply not running Active Setups correctly. They seem to not put in HKCU which when run in GUI were producing an error message:

Error 123: The filename, directory name or volume label syntax is incorrect.

When this was logged out with MSI Verbose logging, the options I was using were msiexec /fup also produced an error complaining about SECREPAIR Hash Issues pulling down from the ConfigMgr DP. This behaviour was also witnessed when running a repair from Add/Remove Programs.

After spending alot of time looking at my 2012 Environment which I have built at least 20 times for different clients it turns out that in August 2014, Microsoft released an update for Windows Installer which has a known issue for how it handles Secrepair CryptAcquire for MSI’s. The result of this update is the impact talked about in this article.

By removing this update (KB2918614) all of my MSI repairs returned to their normal working state of referencing the locations on ConfigMgr DP.

I am not sure how widespread the issue is as it was difficult to get any information on but after spending a considerable amount of time on this, if I can help anyone else something good will have come from this 🙂