I'm at my wits end on this one. I have an important machine in the office where the automatic updates subsystem thinks it always needs the same three patches. No matter how many times I let the machine go ahead and install them, the notifications keep coming up saying that the same three patches are still needed. I have tried letting the machine install them from the system tray icon, manually from the Windows Update web site, as well as via the "Install updates and shut down" option in the shutdown menu. All of those methods appear to install and finish successfully but result in no change. The same three patches keep coming up as needed.

Obviously, there is something corrupted or out of sync with the update catalog but I can not for the life of me find anything on how to fix or reset it. I ran across a few semi-related solutions for fixing Windows Update issues but they were three or four years old. With the updating M$ has done to the Windows Update system itself though, I'm concerned that an older "fix" may end up actually breaking something.

XP SP2 w/ Automatic Updates set for daily via the Internet.

Thoughts?

 

seems strange...were the patches already successfully installed (can you see them in 'Add/Remove programs')? anything suspecious come up in event viewer as they are attempting to get installed?

 

Nothing out of the ordinary in the local event logs. Remote scans of the machine with HfNetChk Pro show the suspect patches as being installed.

 

Can you uninstall the patches/updates?

 

I've seen that before on me hone PC. I just manually went to windows update site and told it to install them.

This was normally associated (or seemed to be) when I ran CCleaner and is removed the backed up files from the update.

 

Whoever is logged in on the machine has to be an administrator or domain admin or the patches will fail everytime.

 

You can try writing those 3 patches down and turning off automatic updates and DL them manually. Once downloaded, keep going back to widows update until the express scan says no updates needed and then turn automatic updates back on.

 

Ummm...dumb question. How do I uninstall specific patches? Amazingly, I've never actually had to do this before as our environment is pretty vanilla. Do I just run spuninst.exe out of the patche's respective $NtUninstall subdir in \Windows? There are subdirs present for all three of my suspects.

All of my attempts at resolving this have been while logged in as local administrator.

 

Add/Remove programs, and make sure "Show updates" is checked.

 

x 10
Completely forgot about that little checkbox.

 

I had that problem on a couple machines in my office, too. It was really annoying, but the problem finally went away on its own after I gave up trying to fix it.

 

In some cases the service that runs the updates is disabled and must be reenabled.
Windows Installer (service) Adds, modifies, and removes applications provided as a Windows Installer (*.msi) package. If this service is disabled, any services that explicitly depend on it will fail to start.
Check the status by doing the following steps...

Start>Run> services.msc click OK
This opens the services dialog..
Scroll down to the Windows Installer Service and ensure it is not disabled. Right click select properties then change startup type to Manual. Then click on the start(service) button.

 

I've had the same problem, more times than I can count, with the .NET framework Service Packs.

I have to uninstall the framework, reboot, reinstall .NET, reboot, then apply the patches. Usually works...justa pita