So this weekend was update time at home. First I updated my main Windows 8 machine to 8.1, which worked fine. Then I tried installing Visual Studio Professional 2013 (while keeping 2012). It initially installed fine, but when starting it for the first time, I got an error:
"Cannot find one of more components. Please reinstall the application"
So okay, I repaired the installation and the installer crashed (twice). I uninstalled the whole thing and installed it again, same problem.
I tried it on VM I had just installed and there is worked, so the ISO file was okay.
So in comes our friend Process Monitor and indeed it shows a few 'Access Denieds' on C:\ProgramData by devenv.exe.
So I tried again as an elevated administrator, this time it worked. Maybe it needed to create some stuff first time I runs, but no, the normal user still gets the stupid 'Please reinstall the application' error.
So I fixed the permissions on ProgramData and now it works for a normal user as well. In an elevated PowerShell run:
& icacls.exe "$env:ProgramData\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0" /Q /T /grant "Users:`(OI`)`(CI`)`(M`)"