Windows Updates Won't Install

I've had that before on one of my computers, but fortunately it died before I had to resolve the issue. This time, I had a nice customer who needed help so I put a bit more effort in.

The usual suggestions didn't work. If the problem has occurred after XP repair then Microsoft suggest doing this:

net stop wuauserv
regsvr32 wupi2.dll
net start wuauserv

and someone else suggested (with good reports of success) that you regsvr32 anything that begins with wu and ends in dll in your system32 directory. The assumption being that Windows has forgotten where it put the Windows Update dlls and that reminding it will sort everything out.

I tried these, and I tried working out why the error logs said I didn't have something I'd never heard of installed, but in the end what seemed to fix it was the uninstallation of XP service pack 3, followed by reinstallation.

My symptoms seemed to be a little more severe than most, in that barely anything would install properly, giving the useful error message that basically says "install no work".

I also salute Microsoft for the .NET Framework 3.5 Setup download progress bar - it not only went up but down, which I didn't think would be easy to do.

Now it's happily installing the last 35 security updates it missed.