How in the Tech

Fixing Windows Update When it Gets Confused

By Adam Myers ⋅ April 21, 2008 ⋅ Tags: microsoft, svchost, windows, windows update

Every second Tuesday of the month Microsoft issues a whack of patches for its products, mostly focusing around their core products - Windows and Office. Many XP/Vista installs are configured to download and install the patches automatically, without bothering the user unless a reboot is required in order to complete the installs. However, another option for Windows Update is to only download the updates or notify the user when updates are available. The onus is pushed to the more knowledgable users to install all or even a subset of the patches at their conveinence. Upon shutdown or restart of Windows you are provided the option to install the updates available. How nice of Microsoft!

While the updates are being installed, you are urged to not turn off your computer as it will turn itself off upon completion. Sounds nice, but that isn’t always the case. More than a few times I’ve seen the process hang there for hours, leaving you no choice but to ignore Microsoft’s advice and turn it off manually. It turns out that Microsoft may have this one correct. After booting into XP all appears well, until your next Windows Update. Visiting http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/ and scanning for updates results in an error message. Other times, your PC may spit out an application error with svchost.exe.

svchost.exe — application error the instruction at “0×745f2780″ reference memory at “0×00000000″. the memory could not be ‘read’

Looking into the event log may yield the following:

Faulting application svchost.exe, version 5.1.2600.2180, faulting module msi.dll, version 3.1.4000.2435, fault address 0×00012780.

There are a few complicated suggestions on how to fix this out there, usually revolving around the re-registrying of DLLs associated with Windows Update. However, I’ve got an easier solution that has worked quite a few times for me.

1. Click on Start
2. Right click on My Computer
3. Click Properties then the Automatic Updates tab
4. Choose Turn off automatic updates and reboot your computer
5. After the reboot, launch Windows Update manually by going to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com
6. The error message should have disappeared,  now feel free to turn your automatic updates back on

My recommendation moving forward is to never allow Windows to install the updates when you Shutdown, rather install them manually from inside Windows. I theorize that turning off your PC in mid-install leaves Windows Update in corrupted state that it can’t recover from on its own.

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