Windows 10 Media Creation Tool "Something happened" Error Solved

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Like many people, I've been trying to upgrade one of my laptops to Windows 10 using the Media Creation Tool and encountering the useless error "Something happened." I searched the internet, and found a lot of posts advising me to change legacy (non-UTF) language settings to "English (US)", which appears to be working for some people but did not help me. I also followed instructions to stop and start Windows Update service, clear update downloads, and none of these worked either.

I was finally able to figure out a way to create a USB using the Media Creation Tool. I regularly run as a Limited User for security reasons, and I have an Administrator account that I use only for administering my system. As such, I ran the Media Creation Tool by elevating to admin permissions (for example, context menu Run as Administrator).

Normally, this should work fine, by giving the application the permissions that it needs to run. Most installers work this way, and certainly I expected the official Windows upgrade tool to work correctly as well.

Unfortunately, this seems to be the cause of the cryptic Something happened... error in my case. Instead of attempting to run the Media Creation Tool as my normal (limited) user, I logged into my Administrator account on a hunch. Sure enough, the app ran and created my media correctly on the first try (after dozens of failed attempts prior).

This is an unfortunate missed QA opportunity from Microsoft as I'm sure it's caused lots of people headaches in the upgrade process. If you're running into this issue, here are the steps to take:
  1. Log into an Administrator account. If you have to enter a password when the UAC prompt pops up, the account you're using is not an Administrator. 
  2. Run the Media Creation Tool from this Administrator account.
I hope this helps save somebody else a lot of time! Let me know in the comments.

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