<Just putting this on the internet, in case it helps some poor soul. There are a lot of forum posts with the issue, none with the solution.>

I was recently trying to install Adobe Reader, and had an unfortunate blue screen right near the end. When trying to install again, I got this error:

Error 1328. Error applying patch to file C:\Config.Msi\PTxx.tmp. It has probably been updated by other means and can no longer be modified by this patch.  For more information contact your patch vendor.

Apparently, Adobe Reader 11.1 is distributed internally as two MSIs: “Adobe Reader 11”, plus a patch to bring 11.0 to 11.1.

After turning on MSI logging, I could see that the temporary installer files were going to C:\ProgramData\Adobe\Setup\{GUID}.

The solution, in my case, was to go to that location, run AcroRead.msi manually, run AdbeRdrUpd11001.msp manually (which failed), and then go to the control panel to uninstall Adobe Reader.

After that, running the official setup program (from http://get.adobe.com/reader/) worked.

Additional things I did along the way that may have helped, but I don’t think were required:

• Manually deleted files left behind in ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Reader 11.0’. To do this, I had to take ownership of the files, and manually give myself permission to delete them.
• Manually deleted a bunch of .tmp files from ‘C:\Config.msi\…’ that were time stamped from around the time I was doing this installation.
• Manually deleted a few MSIs from ‘C:\Windows\Installer’ that were time stamped from around the time I was doing this installation.