More Fun with Microsoft Update: 0×80072EE2

I had to do a factory restore on a Windows XP Tablet PC today. That, in itself, wasn’t all that tough (we’ll ignore the wasted few hours when I mistakenly installed XP Pro [not Tablet] on it…). After the recovery was completed, I ran into an interesting challenge with Microsoft Update though.

Microsoft Update

The restore process left me at XP service pack 2. Using Microsoft Update I was successfully able to install Service Pack 3 with no issues. After a reboot I was then able to get the next round of updates with no problems as well.

Next, I joined the machine to our work domain, rebooted and logged in as my domain admin account to continue patching and configurations.

However, Microsoft Update would no longer work. It kept failing with an Error 0×80072EE2. I recalled that I had similar Update issues last month with Server 2008 but how I fixed that one wasn’t an option (no “Bits” exception to check in the Firewall exceptions). It did give me a hint though. I noticed that if I disabled the windows firewall completely the update process could indeed function.

This machine is a demo machine. It travels and joins many networks. No way am I going to disable a firewall or instruct C level officers to disable the firewall to get updates and then remember to re-enable it! Oh heck no.

I did a bunch of searching and saw a lot of similar complaints but no answers that worked for me. Hate that – makes me very frustrated not to get the “common” issues. I always gotta do things the hard way.

Upon reflection, I realized that things stopped working after I had added the machine to the domain. On a whim, I added my domain account to the machine’s local Admin group and re-enabled the firewall.

Bingo! That got the updates going again. Can non-privileged users not run Microsoft Update directly? Or did something get broke when adding to the domain? I don’t know, but that bears some research I suppose.

Tomorrow I’ll turn on auto-updates and make sure those still work – since that runs as a service, I’m not anticipating issues… hopefully…

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