A friend of mine was having an issue getting the Web Platform Installer to work on his Windows Server 2008 R2 box. He said there was some sort of cert error and asked me to try https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=158722 on my local machine to see if I got the cert error.  I tried it and I did get a cert error on Windows 7 64bit. I happened to notice that that url simply redirects to https://www.microsoft.com/web/webpi/2.0/WebProductList.xml . Out of curiosity I dropped to a command line and tried to run .\WebPlatformInstaller.exe /? to see if there were any command line options. It gave an error that said invalid URI. So we tried running it with the product list url like: "WebPlatformInstaller.exe https://www.microsoft.com/web/webpi/2.0/WebProductList.xml" . This seems to get around the expired cert that is on go.microsoft.com.  Here's a screen shot of the error: