Have you looked in the event log, there should be information from the Windows Update Agent in the System log
To do this:
- Right Click My Computer (either on the desktop or your start menu, depending on what menu setup you have)
- Click Manage
- Click Event Viewer from the tree on the left.
- Click System Log
- Look for entries from the Source "Windows Update Agent" in the pane on the right, these may provide some clues as to whats happening.
If you can't see any its possible the Service may not be running:
- on the same dialog click on the "Services and Applications" Branch of the tree on the left, then click "Services" when its expanded.
- Check for the "Automatic Updates" Ensure its running.
- Check for the Background Intelligent Transfer Service, see if thats running, if its not, see if you can start it, windows doesn't need to be running to start an update but it uses it to download the updates so it needs to be able to be started up and work.
If you can't see some of these things it could be due to the service pack level, are you running SP2?
Another thing to check is to login as an admin user and see what updates it wants to download, some updates require you to manually agree to a license, even when automatically install updates is set if one of these is in the queue you will need to manually agree to the licence before it installs.
Hopefully some of the above will give you a starting place, or if you are lucky a solution :)
Cheers
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by: LeeTutorPosted on 2007-09-27 at 16:28:01ID: 19975506
I recently was sent this article in my online subscription to Windows Secrets magazine:
http://windowssecrets.com/
Note in particular this section, whilch you may find useful in getting Windows Updates working again:
Manually registering files solves the problem
If you find that Windows Update refuses to install most patches, you can register its missing DLLs yourself. This can be accomplished by manually entering seven commands (shown in Step 2, below) at a command prompt. If you need to run the fix on multiple machines, it's easiest to use a batch file, as Steps 1 through 5 explain:
Step 1. Open Notepad (or any text editor).
Step 2. Copy and paste the following command lines into the Notepad window (the /s switch runs the commands silently, freeing you from having to press Enter after each line):
regsvr32 /s wuapi.dll
regsvr32 /s wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32 /s wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 /s wucltui.dll
regsvr32 /s wups2.dll
regsvr32 /s wups.dll
regsvr32 /s wuweb.dll
Step 3. Save the file to your desktop, using a .bat or .cmd extension.
Step 4. Double-click the icon of the .bat or .cmd file.
Step 5. A command window will open, run the commands, and then close.
The next time you visit the Windows Update site, you should not have any problem installing the latest patches.