I was working on a server doing some cleanup of old applications when I was suddenly not able to uninstall or install applications anymore. I would get an error about the Windows Installer Service failing. I have a quick glance at the event logs and found this gem of an error:

This error does not give a huge amount of details, but according to Microsoft it translates to “The system cannot find the path specified“. 

I tried several fixes including running the following commands. You must have the services console closed or it will not properly reset the service.

This did not correct the issue, I next found a direct uninstall command and executed it manually from the command line adding logging to the the command to see what the installer service was having an issue with.

This returned the following error code:

I have now reached the point that it looks like reinstall of the Windows installer would be the fastest solution, to do this I first cleaned the old installer from the system using the following commands.

After restarting the system I downloaded and installed a new copy of the Windows Installer from Microsoft. After one more reboot I was able to continue application uninstalls on the server.