I posted the same issue with Sonar Platinum on this forum yesterday. No luck so far.
Hello and welcome to Advanced Installer forums, Thank you for your interest in Advanced Installer. Yes, I can reproduce and confirm this issue. A fix will be available in the next version of Advanced Installer, thank you for bringing it to our attention.
No response from Cakewalk support for 3 days now. Spent hours with Microsoft support. It was useless. I uninstalled the latest Windows updates but it did not fix the issue. I am also hoping for a solution without reverting to an older version of windows. I also had issues with XLN audio and Waves standalone plug ins that were fixed by reinstalling them except for GTRSolo3.5 which will still not launch and freezes. I had contacts with Waves support.
They were quick to respond. They are looking into it and am waiting for a response. By the way, when I leave the Windows Installer popup long enough (about 1/2 hour) a second pop up will come up: Install server not responding: I hit cancel and Sonar launches. Same with Waves GTRSolo. Not sure if it is related but a few months ago many users were getting a pop up window warning of missing dll files. So Sonar stalled or would not load. W10 was taking certain needed dll files and erasing the content or?
The dll was there but showed as 0 bytes. The solution was either re install Sonar or the effected VST or have a back up of the folder where this was happening, like your Sonar vst plug in folder, and copy an earlier healthy dll to overwrite the bad one. I would put my money on W10 updates trashing Sonar. This started in August. It only hot some systems so hard to nail down why This is why I will no longer use W10.
Either switch DAW's, or turn off W10 updates or do like I did and revert to W 8.1. I had this problem too. After Windows 10 updated to build 1709, I could no longer start Sonar Platinum. The Windows Installer window opens with 'Preparing to install.'
But hung there. I decided to look and see what Windows Installer was actually trying to do. If you start a cmd prompt and type 'start%temp%' you should see some files starting with MSI. Just look for the latest one. In my case, I had this error: 'Failed to grab execution mutex. System error 258.' I did some research and this error can be caused by the msiexec process already running.
I terminated this process and tried to start Sonar again. That time, the GUI showed that it was trying to install my mixing board driver (Yamaha MG10XU). Looking again at the MSI logs I saw that it had a problem. So I uninstalled the driver, started Sonar successfully, reinstalled the driver, and then started Sonar successfully. So check your MSI logs and see if you are getting a similar error: 'Failed to grab execution mutex. System error 258.' And if so, make sure that you terminate all msiexe processes and insure that all drivers are installing correctly.
Hope this helps.