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  • Unable to Install Anything on Windows 8

I upgraded all my PC's in the house to Windows 8 including my main rig. I installed Start8 so that I get the old start menu back, but I uninstalled it since I got used to the Windows 8 UI start menu. But it seems to have caused me some sort of problem. I am unable to install anything new on my machine. All setups give me an error claiming that, they are unable to find "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu" and that they don't have any permission to access it, even if I run all setups as Administrator. I Googled for 2 weeks and still did not find a solution. Can any of you help me out here ?
Just to trace this back to the roots, can you reinstall Start8?
I did reinstall Start8 and tried a bunch of stuff and it changed nothing. I am not even sure it is from Start8. Any suggestions ?
I haven't really gotten my hands on Windows 8 yet, so no clue. But on top of my head here, how about a system restore? With Windows 7, there's a restore point that is date to the installation date, remains there for 1 month and is replaced later automatically. I'm presuming Windows 8 has that as well. Try to do a system restore to installation date. Let me know what happens then.
AvoK95 wroteI upgraded all my PC's in the house to Windows 8 including my main rig. I installed Start8 so that I get the old start menu back, but I uninstalled it since I got used to the Windows 8 UI start menu. But it seems to have caused me some sort of problem. I am unable to install anything new on my machine. All setups give me an error claiming that, they are unable to find "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu" and that they don't have any permission to access it, even if I run all setups as Administrator. I Googled for 2 weeks and still did not find a solution. Can any of you help me out here ?
Well, I have no idea if what I'm going to propose is going to work or not but you can give it a try anyway...

Navigate to the path that appears in the error message...
1. If it's not there, try to create the folders yourself. And proceed to the second point.
2. If the folder structure is already there, right click and choose properties. Choose the security tab, then click on the Edit button. Click on the Add button. Type "Everyone" in the textarea and click Ok. Then give it Full Control permissions.

Let me know if that helps.
@Nabs,
I disable System Restore when I installed Windows due to the lack of hard drive space.

@Kassem,
I actually did what you said with high hops and expectations of it to work, but unfortunately it didn't. I tried several other stuff I found from Google, like System File checking (Which killed my crack BTW) unregistring and re-registring windows installer, cleaning %temp% folder, and I even set permissions to C:\Windows\Installations folder. Still, nothing seems to work :/
Looks like you'll have to reinstall.
I'm trying not to do that and fix the problem myself, because if I do that, I'll start doing it every time I have a small problem. Also, I have tons of programs and setting I don't want to re install, since they are a pain in the *you know what* and most of them require big downloads.

Does anyone know how to refresh Windows 8 without loosing any of my programs ?
I just noticed that all of the installs that are not running are all Microsoft Installer (MSI) setups and all are giving the same 2 errors (Error 2503 and 2502)
I SOLVED IT! It turned out to be a permissions problem caused by a tweek I misused.
What I did was:
- I enabled the Administrator account in Windows
- I logged into the account
- I took ownership of everything in Local Disk C:
- I took ownership of "C:\Program Data\ Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs" folder
- I opened CMD as admin and wrote "secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\inf\defltbase.inf /db defltbase.sdb /verbose" to reset all permissions.
- I restarted


Thanks for the help anyway, and Nabs I am turning on system restore back right away!
Hehehe... Good to know things got working out for ya, mate!