.NET Framework 4 setup reports success but mscoree.dll is not updated
For anyone who hit this and trustedinstaller.exe is present, I’d love to get in touch with you to hopefully find potential other root causes of this issue.
Below are more details about the issue for those of you that are interested.
.NET 4 depends on a Windows Update which is documented in these KB articles:
Win7 = http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958488
Vista = http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956250
Aaron Stebner did a good job in root causing this down to an issue with Windows Update on the machine. He documented his analysis here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2010/12/29/10110053.aspx
I took Aaron’s investigation a step further and was able to find a concrete example of where I could get Windows Update to return “not applicable” on a machine where an update should have been applicable. On this machine TrustedInstaller.exe was not present on the machine which is critical for correct behavior of Windows Update.
I then found that there are numerous places on the web that are telling people to disable, remove, or in other ways kill trusted installer. This is a bad idea and appears to be the root cause of a lot of these issues. Products that depend on your copy of Windows being up to date will all exhibit weird behaviors if the update cannot be applied. The workarounds I’m seeing for this issue are scary and likely have unintended consequences such as future updates failing to install and putting your machine in a state that Microsoft can’t support. I dont recommend taking ownership of system files, hacking files out of installer packages and manually updating them.
Original post by Peter Marcu