How to perform Offline Installation of IRDA Feature on Windows 11 25H2

I am going to preface my post with some information before getting into the details.

Yes, I am aware that the IRDA stack is deprecated in Microsoft Windows as it is old technology. I am also equally aware that newer technologies exist. I work with a device that requires transferring data over an IRDA port, this cannot be changed.

I am working on simplifying and creating an offline installation method for customers that need to install an Infrared USB Dongle that requires the IRDA stack to facilitate communication between a computer and a hardware device. It appears that everything works as I expect using the Optional Features on Demand to install the IRDA package on computers running Windows 11 22H2 through 24H2, however 25H2 treats the installation as if it is being performed with a corrupt package.

In doing some research, the IRDA package that exists on the FOD ISO for Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 shows that the version of Windows that it supports is OS Build 26100. I am wondering two things.

First, I am curious if this installation is failing because the OS build for 25H2 is 26200.x (I assume this to be why it is failing.)

Second, I am wondering if there is any way to install this feature on 25H2 that can be done offline. I work with customers who have very complex environments that utilize WSUS to control their updates (which I understand is completely reasonable) and installing the feature via Optional Features within the actual GUI effectively never works due to the restrictions in place on downloading these features from a source outside the environment. We had been able to utilize Powershell to install the capability utilizing the Add-WindowsCapability applet, but that has also become difficult to do without finding and stamping out every cached registry setting for where to get updates from, and bypassing multiple group policies.

This is a huge pain point for many of my customers and it makes training non-technical staff incredibly challenging as most IT departments refuse to make exceptions for edge cases like this, so this offline installation is almost vital at this point.

When attempting to add the feature using the Add-WindowsCapability command in powershell, we are utilizing the -Source and -LimitAccess flags to ensure that the computer looks at a repo that has the package files and all of the necessary metadata files as well, yet we are getting an 0x800f0955 error on computers that are on 25H2 still which leads me to believe there is an issue that I have no idea how to resolve for newer installations of Windows 11.

Any assistance is greatly appreciated.

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