Windows certificate problem - at least for a better description

Question

I'm not sure where this should be posted.  I believe it's actually a Windows problem, so i'll try here first.
Okay, I was installing SQL 2012 express server and I ran into a problem during the installation.  It's been too long ago, and too many correction attempts since to remember what the original problem even was.  But, anyways I uninstalled the installation
and tried again, and again and again.   I was getting these errors:   Well damn, I've uninstalled my latest attempt and the error logs are gone.  Anyways it was failing on a certificate issue and then unable to find a start-up handle for the
database engine. After this I tried all of the suggested fixes put forth on msdn,  Stack OverFlow and several blogs, nothing worked.  One of the suggestions was to create a new account/profile and try installing with that account. At that point I
discovered that I couldn't create a functional new profile; every one failed when trying to log in.  That's why I think it is a Windows 8.1 problem and not a SQL installation problem, although it's likely that created the original problem. Anyways, I'm
stuck.  Any ideas, beyond re-installing (I'll probably wait for the April 8th update and see if that happens to fix the problem before suffering the inconvenience of a complete re-install) win 8.1?  I can recreate the error logs by going through
the installation again if they could help or I can pull the logs from one of the other blogs.
Thanks,
Ray

Answer 1

After more digging around I found another instance of this problem reported here:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/43cb5946-9d82-4973-b8a1-4053aa688ba8/user-profile-service-failed-the-signin-user-profile-cannot-be-loaded-for-any-new-accounts?forum=w8itprogeneral
( it won't let me post a link, so we get plain text)
As suggested in the mentioned post, checking my Event Viewer showed basically two type of Errors:  Event ID 1500 when trying to log in to Windows 8.1 with the newly created profile or creating a new profile; and Event ID 1511 when trying to install
SQL 2012 Server Express.  Later on in the error logs, errors with certificates are mentioned.  Further digging showed that in each case the errors occurred when an attempt was made to copy files from the Default profile, specifically files in the
\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VSCommon folder, to a Temp folder during creation of the new profile.  I copied these files to another temp folder and removed them from the offending location. After doing so, SQL 2012 Server Express installed properly and I
was able to create a new user profile which could log into Windows.  I haven't seen any other problems since the files were removed, VS2013 works fine, but it did before these issues popped-up too. (VS2012 was upgraded several months ago, so maybe the
files were left from that?).
Hope this might help others who run into certificate problems when creating profiles, either during installation of programs or when creating a new user profile.