a referral was returned from the server

I hope this is the right place for question, if not it would be great if you could point me in the right direction. My computer is an asus running win 8.1, home version. It stopped allowing software installs a few weeks ago, now it just says "a referral was returned from the server". In my administrative account, it returns with "ShellExecuteEx failed; code 8235". I've tried turning off UAC, no luck. The answer I see most often calls for adjusting settings in group policy, but I don't have group policy as my Windows is home version. Pretty much sure I'm going to clean reinstall, but I need to know why this is happening, in case it happens again. Thank You in advance!