We took a call today from a customer trying to get SQL server on a freshly installed Windows 10 PC. The PC in question is brand new with a fresh install of Windows 10 and so any errors we see are likely to be unusual. The SQL Server 2012 installer was simply stopping with the error “Attempted to perform an unauthorized operation”.
There are dozens of potential causes of this issue and we tried looking at all of them but it turns out that the installer is broken simply because it cannot write to a registry used by Microsoft Edge. Why on earth the SQL installer should write to the registry for some software we do not even recommend is beyond me, if not surprising. The simple fix, it turns out, is to update Edge.
More details are available on the Microsoft site here.