Something strange happened just before the holidays and XP (Pro) became very unstable. At the same time, our router stopped working completely — no power-on light — and three hard disks developed sector errors, so my guess is that we had a spike that fried the router and crashed/rebooted XP in such a way that things died. My account was the one that was logged on at the time, and among the various oddities that occurred were things such as minimized programs not appearing in the task bar, not being able to access certain shared directories that other accounts could access, etc., etc. After spending several hours trying system restore points (all failed), I did a repair installation of XP.
After the repair installation, XP appeared to work fine for everyone except me. My account still had issues with minimized programs, etc., so I created a new account, moved my data to the new account, deleted the old account, and then renamed the new account with the old account’s name. Now everything looks like before — and actually works again — unless you go and look at the directory structure. Renaming the new account with the old account’s name changes things on the surface, but inside the new account keeps the new directory name. C’est la vie.
Now I have updates to do. The downloads begin and I go to sleep. The next morning, I shut down the account and see that 88 updates are going to install. That’s going to take a while, so I go get coffee. When I come back up, XP has restarted, so I force another update and am surprised to see that I still have 88 updates to install. Time to run the cycle again…
This time I watch, and as XP starts to shut down it begins by saying “Installing update 1 of 88″ and gives the various warnings about not powering down the machine. Seeveral seconds later, however, it gives the “shutting down” message and indeed shuts down. When I reboot and check, nothing has been updated. Off to updates.microsoft.com where I manually go through the update routine and get a failure message. I search Microsoft support for various terms, including:
XP update failure
XP update fails no error message
XP update downloads but will not install
XP updates will not install
etc.
Nada. Zippo from Microsoft. Don’t get me wrong, the knowledge base has hundreds of entries which show when searching for the above terms, but nothing relates to my problem. I eventually search using a whole sentence from the failure message.
“A problem on your computer is preventing updates from being downloaded or installed.”
But this still gets me nothing. Finally, I search all of the above terms on Google, and on that last sentence I find what I need. It seems that when you do a repair installation of XP, certain modules may not get registered in the kernal properly and must be manually registered. Some of these modules affect the operation of Windows Update. The process to register them is shown below.
- Click your START button and go up to Accessories.
- Find “Command Prompt” and start it. An ugly black box with some white text in it will appear. For those of you who never got to experience DOS, this is what it looked like.
- Now you need to type in some text. Type each line below exactly as you see it and press enter. After you press enter, a confirmation box that the “DLL was registered” will appear from Windows. Just click OK and proceed to the next line.regsvr32 wuapi.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 wucltui.dll
regsvr32 wups2.dll
regsvr32 wups.dll
regsvr32 wuweb.dll - When done, you can rejoin the modern era by closing the Command Prompt window by clicking the ‘X’ in the upper righthand corner like a normal Windows program, or you can type ‘exit’, followed by enter. Either way, Command Prompt goes away.
At this point, Windows Update should work fine.
Uff Da!
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