This App Won't Run On Your PC

I apologize if this has been discussed, but I'm in Afghanistan currently so my ability to Google is more limited than back home in the US. That said, I cant find anyone else with this error.

I'm trying to do something very simple- install XBMC onto my laptop. When I download the installer and save it to the desktop, then double click, I get a black banner across the center of my screen which says "Sorry. This app cant run on your PC."

It offers no solutions other than to check with the developer, and looking on the XBMC forums, I cant find the error there either. (In fact, googling for that phrase in quotes, apparently I'm the only person on the internet with this error...)

Some background- I purchased this laptop in August with Windows 7 on it. When W8 came out, I downloaded it via the Windows Update thing. I apologize for not remembering the name of it, but it's the utility you get from MS to upgrade to W8 from within W7 with no installation media. I never downloaded any ISO files or anything, it just automatically took care of everything. I think it erroneously gave me a non-US version, as a lot of the text and notifications were spelled in the UK versions of english. I figure that might have something to do with the problem. Anyways, it worked fine, and for the last couple weeks I've been using W8 happily.

The same error occurs when trying to install a program called unetbootin, which writes linux ISOs to USB thumb drives.

This is the XBMC installer that you get from the Windows link off their website, so its not some whacky experimental version. I tried running the installer in compatibility mode for W7 and XP, with identical results. I then did a full Windows refresh, the delete-all-your-files kind that resets everything to factory fresh. Again, no luck, same error when trying to run the installer.

Any help would be immensely appreciated.

Edit- One last thing I tried as per the recommendation of a MS forum mod here was to install .NET 3.5, which had no effect.

I have been running XBMC for years, after upgrading to Windows 8 Pro from Windows 7 Home Premium, it still works fine.

I would save the xbmc installer to a temp directory or usb stick and try installing that way, also before trying again make sure the all parts of the old installed xbmc are gone.

make sure you are downloading the correct version for your computer: Downloads | XBMC

[DEL][/DEL]I can only find a single version to download- click the big Windows link, and xbmx-11.exe starts to download.

Also, I tried running the installer off of both an external drive and the desktop, with identical results.