Unable to update visual studio installer

If you have malwarebytes then you can add to the allow list C:\Program Files(x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio and it will work.

I just recently encountered the same error while trying to update the Visual Studio 2017 installer on Windows 10. In my case, the c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer directory was locked because of virus/malware scanning software running in the background. After stopping that, the installation of the VS 2017 installer had no more problems.

What initially misled me about the source of the problem was that the process which had a lock on the files in that directory was the special System process in Process Explorer, so I was initially going down the wrong rabbit hole.

I got it working by downloading the installer separately, rebooting, and running the installer directly.

VS Installer Downloads

The initial solution I found was to reinstall Visual Studio but felt that it might be unnecessary. The solution I found was to close down visual studio, go to "c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer", rename the folder "Installer" to something else then run vs_installer.exe from the renamed folder.

Hope that help someone.