I mentioned in my previous post that I’d managed to avoid performing a complete XP reinstall when changing my motherboard by following the steps in this MS Knowledge Base Article. However I noticed that I wasn’t getting the surge of windows updates that I’d expected since I assumed the process would replace a bunch of files from the original XP SP2 CD.
It turned out that Windows Update was bottlenecked on the Microsoft Installer 3.1 update, which was refusing to install correctly. I fixed that by manually downloading the Windows Installer 3.1 redist package and installing it, after which I got the expected 80-odd update queue. I shut the machine down and left it to it - but on getting back to the machine the next time I noticed I still had a 79-item queue. Hmm.
Trying to apply the updates manually failed with no indication of why, but digging into the c:\windows\windowsupdate.log I found the message: "Error: 0×80004002. wuauclt handler: failed to spawn COM server" which appeared to be the root of the problem. Some hunting online indicated that a bunch of COM DLLs might have somehow become unregistered through the process of running the upgrade install, so I had to manually REGSVR32 the following DLLs:
WUAPI.DLL
WUAUENG.DLL
WUAUENG1.DLL
ATL.DLL
WUCLTUI.DLL
WUPS.DLL
WUPS2.DLL
WUWEB.DLL
Fun huh? That seems to have done the trick, it’s now chewing through all 80-odd updates in a much happier fashion. Just posting this here in case anyone else follows that KB article and wonders why their updates are broken. It’s a shame the KB article doesn’t deal with this.
September 4th, 2007 at 12:30 am
I followed the same KB article this weekend, and thankfully I did not run into that particular problem. But one thing that did annoy me was being forced to activate before I could log into my account. The network settings were not setup yet, so online activation did not work and I had to call the toll free number. Not a bid deal, just an annoyance.
The only application I seemed to have a problem with was the free AVG 7.5 so I just removed and re-installed it.
Any other application problems crop up for you Steve?
September 4th, 2007 at 8:28 am
Hmm, odd - I just deferred activation after the upgrade, you can use XP for 3 days before it totallly locks you out as I understand it. I wanted to make sure all the hardware worked before reactivating. Once it did I then ran the activation manually from the tray icon.
I haven’t had any other application problems so far. Kaspersky seems to have been unaffected by the changes.
October 23rd, 2007 at 11:37 pm
Just wanted to say thanks I have been trying a couple of days to resolve this issue
November 27th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
Thanks for the info, I was stumped after running a repair of XP.
February 20th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Thanks for the info, Steve. WU was broke after major spyware removal and I was getting the “failure to spawn COM server” error listed above. After trying a few fixes this one did it in the end.
May 13th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
Had the same problem on new builds with installing updates after Office 2003 SP3 after applying XP SP3 - this fixed them. Tried a repair install of Office 2003 and wiped the HDD and reloaded but kept getting the same error - this suggestion fixed the issue and all updates (12 refused the first time, 8 refused the second time after wiping the HDD and reloading from scratch). To automate for any other PCs, just save the following in a text file and replace the “.txt” extension with “.bat”, then double-click to execute - works like a charm. Thanks again for the help!
REGSVR32 WUAPI.DLL
REGSVR32 WUAUENG.DLL
REGSVR32 WUAUENG1.DLL
REGSVR32 ATL.DLL
REGSVR32 WUCLTUI.DLL
REGSVR32 WUPS.DLL
REGSVR32 WUPS2.DLL
REGSVR32 WUWEB.DLL
May 21st, 2008 at 7:40 pm
Thanks this worked like a charm