Hacking at 0300

(It's been almost a year since I've posted. My intellectual life is busy with other things)

I use H&R Block software to prepare my taxes and have been generally very happy, but this year it would not update the program after January 1. Using the automatic update downloaded the updater but it silently failed. Manually downloading from http://www.hrblock.com/tax-software/updates-back-editions/federal-windows.html then running that would run WinZip to unpack it, then silently fail. The tech support at H&R Block was useless.

Some Google-ing led to this solution:

1. Run the update installer from the hrblock.com site as though it was going to work
2. Wait for it to fail
3. Find the unpacked downloaded installer:
   1. Windows-R key then type %temp% to open the temporary download folder
   2. Find the most recent folder (it will have a GUID-type name, like {deaf-face-1234}. Open it
   3. There should be an msp file like H&R Block Deluxe 2016 Update.msp
4. Double click that to run it
5. Run H&R Block

That's all it took! Obviously the unpacking worked correctly, so I don't know why the program wouldn't run the actual installer.