How long should I wait?

[kentsu]

Hi. I'm a first-time user of the product. I started using it so that I could update a laptop that had been backdated to Vista SP2. The process seemed to go well but now the machine has been sitting on the "enumerating IDs, this could take a while, please wait" step for about 12 hours. Is that normal?

Also--thinking that I was doing a good thing, I locked the laptop (Windows key + L) before I went to bed last night, only to discover this morning (by reading forum posts) that there is no way for me to find out what the password to the WOUTempAdmin account is to unlock it. Hence my question about how long I should wait and what I should do to recover, if necessary.

Thanks.

[aker]

If locked out,immedeately reboot by initializing a reboot.
The problem is caused by MS. The increasing number of superseding updates make the search time grow heavily. Please set WU to "Never search for updates", reboot and retry.

[kentsu]

Thanks. I rebooted and was taken to the desktop. I then disabled WU from installing any updates. It's been 9 hours and the script appears to be stuck at the same place as before. What should I do now? Is there a log I can upload or steps I can take? Thanks.

[Denniss]

After disabling Windows Update you have to rebot again as the search process was already initialized (and stalled as usual).

[aker]

You may try installing these updates:

- KB2552343
- KB3033929
- KB3177467
- KB3078601
- KB3109094
- KB3138612
- KB3145739
- KB3164033
- KB3172605
- KB3178034
- KB3185319
- KB3185911

Warning: this is a list created for Windows 7. Not all of them exist for Windows Vista.
Addtionally you may try:
- KB3191203
- KB3183431

Afterwards reboot.

[kentsu]

Update: All is well now. After about 24 hours on a fresh try, I gave up on wsusoffline -- it seemed to be stuck in the same place in the script (enumerating IDs). Feeling a little desperate, I kicked off Windows Update. I let the machine run and, almost four days later, it installed a bunch of stuff (160+ items) all at once.

I watched what was going on during those ~4 days using Task Manager and Resource Monitor. It was very hard to tell whether anything productive was happening. The WU process (inside svchost,exe) always occupied 25% of the CPU, never more, even when I manually set the priority of the process to High. Disk activity was pretty sparse and never displayed a filename that seemed to mean much (mostly SOFTWARE and SOFTWARE.LOG). There was a bit more network activity, but certainly not heavy or constant, and sometimes looked like just a heartbeat.

If the wsusoffline script and the WU client use the same engine for figuring out what updates are needed, then I guess the wsusoffline script wasn't stuck after all, and if I had waited, all would have been well. If that's the case, then I have a suggestion: It would be nice if the script could confirm that it is making progress through a long list of available updates. Could it print to the screen the name of each update needed, as it is found?

Thanks,

--Kent

[Denniss]

Our program tries to stop the Windows Update Agent/Service to avoid getting locked by the already stalled/fouled service but that does not always work. Hence the tip to disable Windows Update and rebooot.
Afterwards our program installs some updates which are know to reduce search time before finally starting the full update process