forums.wsusoffline.net

This is not really a WSUS Offline issue, but I thought this might be the most knowledgeable group of people to try to answer my question/issue.

I do a lot of machine rebuilds (multiple manufacturers, multiple OS varieties, mostly Windows 7 though) - I do IT support for lots of small businesses with employees that just can't seem to stop clicking on malware-infested emails.

That said, I've been having nothing but troubles with installing Windows Updates for about the last 2-3 months. WSUS Offline has been a GREAT help in getting a majority of the updates installed, and for a while, that was my solution, but the last 3 weeks or so it's not been enough.

After installing Win7SP1 (pro or home) on a machine (I have one of each currently), I run an up-to-date version of WSUSOffline on them (including NET 4.6, MSSE, IE11, with all reboots and verifications turned on), and it works flawlessly. All updates install, systems reboot as they should, and it completes successfully and fully. I've even rerun it, and there's nothing it else to do.

Then I turn to Windows Update to get the remainder of things installed - and that's where things fall apart. For a while, I could just select all the updates (important and optional) or even big chunks of them, tell it to install, and repeat until the list was empty. That worked, and I could do hundreds at a time if needed. Then it stopped working, and would corrupt the system so that it would have to boot into System Recovery, and a System Restore would have to be performed to get it fixed. Installing 5-10 updates as a time works, till it doesn't, then it's System Restore time. And once it stops working, I can't get past it, even when doing updates 1 at a time with a reboot after each one.

The real problem is that it's not a specific update that causes the corruption - it might be one, then after the System Restore a different one might cause the problem. But it's a loop I just can't get out of either. And the System Restores don't always take you back to the previous point - they often fail and I have to go back more than one restore point at times to get a working system again. And it starts all over again.

I even got so fed up I reinstalled one of the machines clean again, ran the WSUSOffline updates, then ran the System Update Readiness Tool hoping that would fix things - instead, it literally corrupted things and went directly into System Recovery after it finished installing (successfully and rebooted.

So, I'm wondering if I'm the only person seeing these issues? How are other people getting the remainder of Windows Updates installed if they aren't going through Windows Update? Poking through the forums, I've seen a couple other discussions on options, but nothing that seemed like the "best solution".

nlite used to do a nice job of integrating updates and patches into an ISO for installation purposes, but that was XP. ntlite is the new version for Win7-10, but it's HUGELY time consuming compared to the previous version (maybe that's just because of the OS difference), and that alone makes testing it a toss-up - do I spend time there or just keep trying to install things one-off?

Can anyone offer any insight? Maybe there's a known issue (and fix?) to my update problems?

Thanks - hopefully you aren't seeing this same issue, but if you are and you know how to get around it, I'd sure like to know too!

That sounds like Component Store corruption. Normally CheckSUR is bound to fix that.

If you do a "sfc /scannow" in an admin shell, does it report errors that are unfixable?

You could also search for hints in %windir%\WindowsUpdate.log and %windir%\Logs\CBS\CBS.log - although it's literally Greek for non-expert users...