The Problem
The August 2015 Cumulative Update for SharePoint 2013 was released earlier this month as mentioned in Stefan’s Goßner’s blog post here. The installation of the August 2015 Cumulative Update server package may fail with the following error:
“The installation of this package failed”
The error above is a generic error and can occur due to a variety of different reasons such as low disk space, incorrect package download etc. However, for the August 2015 Public Update we have received several reports over the past few days of this issue occurring on multiple machines. In all these occurrences, the root cause of the package installation failure was found to be the following messages in the latest modified MSP log file (e.g. wssmui-en-us_MSPLOG.LOG, but the actual file name in your case could be different depending on which package failed to install) located in the temp folder of the server where you are installing the package (by default, it is C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Temp\2):
CAQuietExec: Error 0x8007000d: CAQuietExec Failed
CustomAction RegisterPerfmonManifest returned actual error code 1603 (note this may not be 100% accurate if translation happened inside sandbox)
The Workaround
On some machines, we have seen that the installation will be successful on the third attempt without any other changes. On others, a registry change is needed to allow the installation to complete successfully. Details of the registry change workaround are provided below.
Important: The workaround involves modifying the registry so please exercise extreme caution while modifying the registry and ensure that you backup the registry before making any edits. It is also important to note that this workaround should only be applied if you have confirmed that the package installation failed due to failure in the custom action RegisterPerfmonManifest by reviewing the MSP log file in the TEMP folder.
To workaround this problem, please complete the following steps on the affected server:
1. Start Registry Editor, and then locate the following key in the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Perflib
2. In the registry, change the Last Counter value to 1846 (decimal), and change the Last Help value to 1847 (decimal). The following screenshot shows what the values should look like:
3. Exit Registry Editor.
Once the above steps have been applied, please re-run the package installation which should complete successfully.
The Root Cause
The root cause of this issue is not known at the time of writing this blog post. We are investigating this issue internally and I will update this post with more details as soon as they become available.