Windows Media Player not Installing

Alright, so I know this thread is almost 7 months old now, however I thought you might like to know that I found out what is going on.

First:
Thank you to both of you. If it wasn't for this thread I would not have even gotten on the right track.

Background: I was having the same issue. I read your posts and that led me to look at the updspapi.log file. After looking at the registry keys it mentioned I found that the permissions for all of them were set incorrectly for whatever reason.

(quick note: Eric, you said you couldn't find the registry keys at all. Do you mean you couldn't even get to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_SECURITYBAND]? If you couldn't, then there is probably a lot more going on with your machine).

Anyhoo, I couldn't change the permissions on the keys directly. I could view permissions and then try to make changes, but when I attempted to apply them I was denied. Not surprising. However, I did see that "inherit permissions from parent..." was checked when I clicked on the "advanced" button on the first tab of the "permissions" box.

At first I went up to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft] and just modified the permissions there with success. If you're unable to do this, then try going up to simply [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE] and changing the permissions there and then recheck the inheritance option.

I figured that the inheritance should traverse down and it wouldn't be a problem. Problem: for some reason the inheritance didn't get picked up by Internet Explorer. So I simply opened up the advanced options of permissions, unchecked and rechecked "inherit permissions from parent..." and the permissions came down. After doing that I finally found that the permissions for the [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_SECURITYBAND] key had been inherited properly and I could now make further modifications to the key if I so wished.

Rinse and repeat for the other key(s) mentioned in log and you should be good to go. Don't worry about the other notifications as they're a result of not being able to modify the registry. The other key I needed to modify was:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Settings\MP3Encoding\LowRate
I didn't have permissions to "Settings" under "MediaPlayer" so I didn't see the MP3Encoding the first time around. I had to fix the permissions for "settings" first. After fixing that, close regedit and reopen as it might not show "MP3Encoding" after making the changes until you restart regedit. Double check that the permissions were inherited properly by "MP3Encoding" and so long as they were, reinstall Windows 11 and it should be successful (again, was for me).

If you're not absolutely sure about what permissions to set, then just make sure the administrators group for your computer has full access rights.

I know this post is old, but I've been looking off and on for a couple months now and if it wasn't for this thread I'd still be without WMP11.

If you found another way of fixing it, please post that too so word can get around :-).

Thanks to both of you guys and hope this info helps!

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