SBS2008 WSUS Server Cleanup wizard stuck

Have you tried selecting one item at a time ?

The WSUS cleanup tool may even work better for you


http://blogs.technet.com/b/sus/archive/2008/10/16/cool-wsus-troubleshooting-tools-and-script-examples.aspx

I have tried both your solutions. While I can clean all other items it gets stuck on 'unused items'. I downloaded the tool and got this message in the history log upon running:

3/15/2011 5:27:41 PM
=======================================

Could Not Connect to the WSUS server!

The commands I tried in run are:
WSUS_Cleanup_CL.exe 'SBS Server Name f 80 all       &
WSUS_Cleanup_CL.exe 'SBS Server Name t 8530 all

Go over

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jjameson/archive/2009/03/28/wsus-server-cleanup-wizard-hangs-on-deleting-unused-updates.aspx

Thanks for this. Do you know where to find and how to run the 'WsusDBMaintenance SQL script'?

Here you go

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc708594(WS.10).aspx

I copied the scrtipt to a script fiile,saved it with the name and ran it a few times until there were no records updated. Still no luck. Cleanup wizard hangs on unused updates

Let's use other tools instead then


http://msmvps.com/blogs/athif/archive/2005/10/27/Purge-Delete-the-downloaded-patches-on-WSUS-Server.aspx

The wsus Cleanup finally managed to run through for the unused items after leaving to run overnight and got rid of thousands. However my WSUSContent folder hasn't shrunk at all. It is exactly the same size as before the cleanup (mpre than 25GB). PLease help

25GB isnt that big at all, in fact thats probably better than average.

If you're having space issues you can move the database and content to another drive/partition.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2009/09/23/how-to-move-wsus-content-and-database-files-to-a-different-partition.aspx

I had earmarked a 30GB partition for this and moved the folders to that when I setup the server. Now I am running out of space on this dedicated partition and would really like to be able lto shrink this instead of it growing endlessly. I am not sure why i did not recover any space although 1000s of updates were deleted?

If these 1000's of updates were never approved WSUS would not have downloaded them anyway. WSUS does not download any updates until they are approved. What got deleted was the information in the database for these files.

30GB is not enough space for WSUS to work with even though it stated that this is a minimum requirement.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc708483(WS.10).aspx

Ours is at 38GB right now

My server has less than 20 clients and thus space requirement of 20Gb as the per your link, i thought should be sufficient. Is there really no way to shrink WSUS? I have never seen it shrink . It only seems to grow.

The number of clients is misleading. It's the number of products and classifications that you have approved. It's also the number of languages.

Do you have "Download express installation files" unchecked ?  these are larger files as well

It was straightforward once the wizard was let to finish once and then run again