Repair Windows Installer Errors

I ran into a problem recently where I tried to install a program on my Windows XP machine and I got an error related to the Windows Installer service, namely

The Windows Installer Service Could Not Be Accessed

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After trying many solutions, I finally got the program to install and fixed the Windows Installer error. Depending on your OS, the solution could be different. In this article, I will go through all the solutions I tried and hopefully one of them will work!

Method 1 – Reregister MSIEXEC

Make sure you are logged on as administrator and then click on Start, Run and type in the following command:

msiexec.exe /unregister

Press Enter and then type this command:

msiexec /regserver

If you are running a 64-bit version of Windows, you will need to type the following command:

%windir%\Syswow64\Msiexec /regserver

Both commands should complete successfully. Now restart the computer and try to install the program again. If this didn’t work, continue reading!

Method 2 – Reinstall Windows Installer

You can also try to repair the problem by reinstalling Windows Installer! Pretty ironic eh! The first thing we want to do is rename some of the current windows installer files before we download the new ones.

Click on Start, Run and type in the following commands below. Press Enter after each command.

cd %windir%\system32
attrib -r -s -h dllcache
ren msi.dll msi.old
ren msiexec.exe msiexec.old
ren msihnd.dll msihnd.old

Next, you want to download the latest version of Windows Installer. We can do that from the Microsoft Download Center.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/default.aspx

Type in Windows Installer in the search box and find the latest version, which will be called Windows Installer X.X Redistributable. Once installed, restart your computer.