Hey all, I'm coming out of a long-term period of general system brokenness, gradually patching one thing up at a time. It used to be that a lot of things were broken -- Event Viewer, Windows Update, driver installation, just to name a few. The last is what I've yet to figure out how to fix. Most of the tools that apply common fixes did about half the job, but the thing was still fairly broken and I've had to do a considerable amount of manual work, fiddling about like crazy with permissions on a lot of system files and folders (granting access to local or network service, trustedinstaller and so forth, restoring ownership to either system or trustedinstaller as applicable when done, etc.).
This last one... I can't dig up a thing. Nothing anywhere online whatsoever. No precedent as far as I can find. The error is nondescriptive and provides no error code, so it's a bit hard to search for it. An assessment using Sysinternals Process Monitor is pretty inconclusive, too... No obvious failure points. I stumbled across this first when attempting to set up my printer shortly after installing Win8.1, around two months ago. The setup program reaches a screen where you're supposed to plug in the printer (which I do), and then simply sits there apparently doing nothing until I choose to Cancel the installation or kill the setup process. An examination with Process Monitor shows that it is just continually performing the same steps over and over, and I can't find a failure point.
Since then, I've done a Refresh, two repair installations (all three of which failed to fix any of the issues I was having, which is why I had to fiddle around myself) and it's still being difficult. I'd blame the driver itself, but upon fixing up Windows Update it's offered two drivers for installation, one labelled Important, the other an Optional update. They both fail, with error 0x8007000D. The suggested solutions for that recommend using the dism /online /scanhealth command, which just finds absolutely nothing wrong whatsoever. Installing any driver manually (via right-clicking an INF file and opting to Install it) gives an unusually plain pop up message saying "The data is invalid.", with a different but somewhat similar chain of events to the printer setup program (although the printer setup was repeating the steps over and over). Exact same thing happens when installing any driver via the Add New Hardware wizard. Exactly what's causing it, I don't know, though I suspect there're probably some system permissions either in the registry or some system files/folders somewhere that have been corrupted somehow. Primary irritating result at present is that I cannot use my printer, which I am rather peeved about. The underlying issue is a little more worrying, though.
Before you shout "It's a virus!" I'll just have to stop you right there and say that no, it isn't. With about 99.999999% certainty. I've run online scanners, boot-time scanning modules, scanned from safe mode, used anti-rootkit tools (every damn one I can find), scanned the MBR sector of the hard disk, contacted some specialists and provided logfiles I have trouble deciphering myself for their examination and been told there's not a trace of malware on this system, used pretty much every tool I can get my hands on without having to pay an arm and a leg to get access to... If I haven't found it by now, then it's either hiding so damn well that quite literally nothing can weed it out (I don't know, I've heard occasional accounts of viruses hiding in some modified firmware in the motherboard itself or something, but I really doubt it) or it's embedded so deeply in the OS that nothing can recognise it. In any case... as far as it's possible to tell, this isn't something cause by an infection... or at least, the infection is no longer on the system. Maybe something got broken before I managed to get rid of an infection a little while ago or something... but if it did, it's something that Microsoft's own built in recovery tools don't cover, including a system Refresh and a Repair install, which is twofold strange.
Anyway, apologies for being verbose, but I hope the info helps...
What else... Well, since it's kind of driver related, I guess a DxDiag might be of some limited use; I'll attach that...
I'm using the latest version of Avira antivirus -- I'd previously used Avast! but got rid of it when my licence expired, roughly three weeks ago by now, I think. (And damn Avast!'s installation can be intrusive, needing Safe Mode just to remove it.)
If you want a copy of the Process Monitor record for each attempt at installing printer drivers, and/or Windows Update's failure to install the other drivers, let me know. I haven't got recordings of them, but I can get them quickly enough.
Any help would be immensely appreciated. I'm trying to do everything I can short of wiping this hard drive clean and reinstalling everything from absolute scratch. I really don't want to do that, if at all possible.
