Cannot install AIR application when the system date is set beyond 10/31/2017

Question

I created a native time-stamped installer for an AIR application. While testing the installer with different system dates, I noticed that the installer does not work when the system date is set beyond 10/31/2017. I tested the same with a self-signed certificate as well as a Verisign certificate and found the behaviour to be consistent. Why does the installer stop working after this date?

Answer 1

Thanks very much for keeping this issue alive.
Let me restate the issue:
We have a AIR 2.0.4.13090 sidecar application. Installing the application for the very first time seems to work. Any uninstall or update after that runs into issues on the problematic Windows 7 64 bit machine. The installer logs all point the finger to Windows Installer having problems writing to the temp directory.
We've gone through many, many things trying to resolve this, including resetting administrative access to the temp directory and flushing the temp directory out entirely. I'm reporting this news secondhand, so it's not possible for me to directly relate the exact measures taken, step-by-step. The ONLY thing that reliably worked for running and installing updates on this AIR application was the following:
1) Create a new administrative level user.
2) Log in with that user.
3) Disable firewalls.
4) Run the updater.
5) Log back in as normal user, delete temporary user.
if the user account created in step 1 is not deleted in step 5 and is used to attempt a further update or uninstall, it will fail. This seems to tell me that AIR is able to utilize the temp folder via Windows Installer correctly only once. After that, it dirties this directory somehow and is unable to use/write to it, and subsequent uninstalls/updates fail with error 0.
Again, the failure all show msi issues writing to the temp directory. They result in an "Error 0" alert dialog in AIR.