Admittedly, I’ve had this problem with Windows Update forever: It hasn’t worked on my system for a while and I could never figure out why. It didn’t matter because all our systems at Microsoft have numerous risk mitigation vectors used upon them including Network Access Protection (automatic scans of the system for proper patch requirements, antivirus sig list version verification, firewall configuration, etc.), login scripts, and System Center Configuration Manager 2007.
One way or another, my systems gonna get patched… or I’m not going to get an IP address on the Microsoft network.
That being said, I’ve been wondering why Windows Update doesn’t work. It’s kind of an annoyance to have something "not functioning" on your personal machine so I started doing some digging at 1:00AM and turned up this in the Windows Vista General Discussion in our community newsgroups:
Try this:
Change the value of the registry key UseWUserver (HKLMSoftwarePoliciesMicrosoftWindowsWindowsupdateAU) from 1 to 0. 🙂 From what I understand, if this is set to 1, it uses the custom server defined in WUServer and WUStatusServer.
Uh. What? I checked this out and sure enough, group policy issued by the company must have configured a different Windows Update server internally as there appears to be an internal address in WUServer & WUStatusServer, both values in the WindowsUpdate key.
So anytime I attempted to use Windows Update on the Internet, BAM. No go. Makes sense…. but I wish there was some sort of message in the Windows Update Control Panel applet that told end users that this was the issue. It’s not hard to display a little message in the Windows Update Control Panel applet that looks at HKLMSoftwarePoliciesMicrosoftWindowsWindowsupdateAU and says: "Hey – your network administrator has pushed down instructions to your computer NOT to use the public Windows Update servers but instead to use private Internal Windows Update Servers, thus if you’re not on your corporate network, you may receive error 80072EFD here."
And by the way, WHAT THE HECK IS A "80072EFD"? Didn’t error codes like these without explanation go the way of the do-do?
kurtsh
Kurt Shintaku's Blog 