MiKTex 2.9: Packages and Styles Not Found Error on Windows 8

I just tried to compile one of my old Latex documents (which compiles fine on my Linux boxes) on my freshly installed Windows 8 machine with MiKTeX 2.9 and all hell broke loose with different a million "missing package" and "missing styles" error. My document is a IEEE conference paper. So it all started with a "IEEEtran.sty missing" error. Interestingly, although I had "Install missing packages on the fly" set to "Yes" (as can be seen on the screenshot), still I was getting this error.

A little bit of debugging through the error messages reveals - it's all about file write permission. Windows 8 has a stricter ACL set for the installed programs on write access. Therefore, the "on the fly" installable packages, although were being fetched, were failing to get installed.

The trivial solution was to launch the "command prompt" (cmd.exe) as administrator and do a "pdflatex document.tex". This time all my missing styles and packages were fetched and installed!

P.S.

• To manually install Latex packages on Windows 8, run "C:\Program Files (x86)\MiKTeX 2.9\miktex\bin\mpm_mfc_admin.exe", select and install your package.
•  To set your packages to install automatically, run "C:\Program Files (x86)\MiKTeX 2.9\miktex\bin\mo_admin.exe" and set "Install missing packages automatically" to "yes" as shown in the screenshot.

MikTex 2.8 Downloading/Missing "ifxetex.sty" On Every Run

I debugged this problem after seeing my LyX on my Windows 7 machine taking so long to finish. I saw "latex" process was taking too long to finish. The I ran "latex" manually and the problem was obvious - "ifxetex" is being downloaded in every run.

This seems to be a bug in MikTex 2.8. The bug report can be found here: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3067362&group_id=10783&atid=110783

The solution is:

1. Copy ...
               from: C:\Program Files (x86)\MikTeX 2.8\tex\generic\ifxetex\ifxetex.sy
               to: C:\Program Files (x86)\MikTeX 2.8\tex\latex\ifxetex\ifxetex.sty
   
2. From Start-Menu > MikTex 2.8 > Maintenance (Admin), run "Update (Admin)" and update all pending update-able packages.
   
3. Start-Menu > MikTex 2.8 > Maintenance (Admin), run "Settings (Admin)". and Then from "General" tab, click "Refresh FNDB" and "Update Formats"

MikTex should not download "ifxetex.sty" in every run now ;-).