Microsoft Update failure

This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’ve been building a Windows XP virtual machine for test purposes and needed to apply the latest updates (even with Windows XP service pack 3 it required over 20 updates to be applied). Unfortunately, Microsoft Update hit a problem and refused to install some of the updates, telling me that “a problem on your computer is preventing updates from being downloaded or installed“. I tried disabling my anti-virus software (AVG Free) but that made no difference.

Microsoft Update: Failed Updates

Microsoft’s advice is to re-register a number of DLLs using the following commands:

regsvr32 wuapi.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32 wucltui.dll
regsvr32 wups.dll
regsvr32 wups2.dll
regsvr32 wuweb.dll

For each successful registration, Windows should return “DllRegisterServer in filename.dll succeeded” but wucltui.dll didn’t seem to exist on my system. Even so, after re-registering the remaining DLLs, Microsoft Update successfully installed the problem updates.

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