Citrix Receiver: The configuration manager cannot be initialized

Today I would like to describe you an interesting problem I had during my last receiver deployments. The start of the installation always failed with the message:

The configuration manager cannot be initialized.

After removing all old Receiver Installations the error still occurred. I cleaned up the registry and file system and removed everything which contained Citrix – but still the same error.
The next step was to use the Citrix Receiver Clean-Up Utility (CTX137494) – normally this tool removes everything related to old Receiver or Online Plugin Versions. But this time this didn’t fix the problem – after using the tool the same error was displayed like before. Time for a more intensive debug and check with procmon which files and registry keys are accessed during the setup start. And there it was – the setup tried to access the following registry key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\UpgradeCodes\9B123F490B54521479D0EDD389BCACC1

I removed the complete registry key and tried again to install the receiver – this time the setup started without any error messages and I was able to install the receiver.