On a newly imaged Windows XP client, I decided to activate “Automatic Updates” via a newly installed WSUS 3.0SP2 server.
But I was seeing this error on my Windows XP client: 2011-11-14 10:31:58:524 1788 2a0 Misc WARNING: DownloadFileInternal failed for http://download.microsoft.com/v7/windowsupdate/redir/wuredir.cab: error 0x80072f78
What the WinXP client is trying to do, is Selfupdate the Windows Update Agent. For some reason, the existing (older) agent wasn’t looking at my new WSUS server. After some Googling, the suggested solution was to run the proxycfg –u command, to import the user’s proxy exclusions into the PC’s WinHTTP settings.
And it worked, but I wasn’t comfortable with the solution. Because it’s changing the machine’s proxy setting, and since I’m going to be doing this to 2500+ desktops … who knows what problems it would cause.
So I gave it some thought, and wondered what would happen if I MANUALLY updated the WinXP client with the new Windows Update Agent, before trying to speak to the WSUS server.
It worked! So what I plan to do next is:
- download the latest Windows Update Agent clients from here:
x86: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=43264
x64: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=43265 - apply it to our WinXP client image, so new machines get the update out of the box*
- deploy it to our existing WinXP machines, which don’t have WSUS enabled yet.
- the command for the Windows Update Agent is:
WindowsUpdateAgent30-x86 /quiet /norestart
* For Windows SP3 and WSUS, Microsoft KB898461 (Package Installer for Windows) is a mandatory patch, so I’ll applying/deploying it as well.