One of our clients brought his laptop in yesterday and said. the windows updates are all failing to install. hmmm. so i found the folder that they install to and renamed that. which is a pain because you cant do that while windows is running. so i had to use Winternals ERD Commander 2005 (which is no longer available, good thing i have a copy) however i could have used any linux live cd. Then i renamed the folder so that windows would re-load all updates. I did that and still no good. still all 92 updates fail. I start reading threw the update log (which is a long one) and i see error code 80004002 at the very bottom. so i do what any good IT guy would do and i google it and i find a page that tells me about manually downloading the windows updater software. so i do i download WindowsUpdateAgent30-x86.exe
and run it and it says “you already have this software no need to reinstall” oh yes there is. so i find that you can run from a command line the file with the switch /wuforce and it will force it so i did that then ran windows updates and they told me that i needed a newer version of the updater so i let it download and install then guess what… all 92 updates installed