WADK Deployment Tools on Windows Server 2008 giving error "The program can't start because api-ms-win-downlevel-advapi32-l4-1-0.dll is missing from your system"

Got this error at an extremely inconvenient time when trying to write some automation scripts for Windows Optional Features using the DISM module as part of the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit running on Windows Server 2008 R2: "The program can't start because api-ms-win-downlevel-advapi32-l4-1-0.dll is missing from your system"

It turns out that the installer for this particular product isn't reliable when you uninstall and then reinstall the ADK. The problem turned out to be that the PATH variable hadn't been updated on the second install, so the PowerShell module that was invoking the DISM.exe executable wasn't able to find the required DLLs, even though they were in the same path as the executable. Go figure.

Enabling MSMQ in Windows via PowerShell

First, let's start off by seeing which Windows features for MSMQ are available in your installation:

Get-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online | ? { $_.FeatureName -like '*msmq*' }

If you see a message like "Failed to load program with incorrect format", double check that you're running a 64-bit version of PowerShell if your machine is running a 64-bit version of Windows.

Then, let's enable the ones we actually need:

$packageResults = @(Get-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online | ? { $_.FeatureName -like '*msmq*' -and $_.State -ne 'Enabled' } | Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -All -NoRestart)

$packagesRequiringRestart = @($packageResults | ? { $_.RestartNeeded })

if ($packagesRequiringRestart.Count -gt 0)
{
    Restart-Computer
}

This script takes the packages with MSMQ in the name, enables them along with any requisite parent features and prevents restart during installation. Once complete, we check the results to see if any installations require a restart. If there are any that require a restart, we restart the computer. As with anything else in PowerShell, and IT in general, use judgement and critical thinking.

IMPORTANT: The Get-WindowsOptionalFeature cmdlet and associated module are part of the DISM module. This module is available built-in with Windows Server 2012 and up. In Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008, it's available as part of the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit available here. Even though the page says the installer is for Windows 8.1, it works on Windows 7 / Server 2008