While Microsoft claimed the ’stealth update’ that updated Windows update files—even when users had disabled automatic updating—was harmless, it turns out it wasn’t completely. For XP users, if you happened to need to “repair” your system using a repair CD, Windows update no longer worked at all.

About 2 months ago, Microsoft pushed out what is being termed a ’stealth update’ to Windows Update. Users are normally asked via the Update system what new patches, security fixes and the like to install and are prompted to install and reboot. However, this update—which was to ‘fix’ the Update system itself—was a stealth push from Microsoft, and installed without asking or notifying the user.

It turns out that any system subsequently suffering a problem of any kind that requires the use of the Windows ‘repair’ function in installation will be locked out from Windows Update. Because the stealth update modifies original Windows files, attempting the repair will clobber Windows Update and cause the system to mark Microsoft’s most recent 80 patches as undeliverable.

Nate Clinton, program manager for Windows Update, explains on the Windows Update blog:

Here’s what we found: when an XP repair CD is used, it replaces all system files (including Windows Update) on your machine with older versions of those files and restores the registry. However, the latest version of Windows Update includes wups2.dll that was not originally present in Windows XP. Therefore, after the repair install of the OS, wups2.dll remains on the system but its registry entries are missing. This mismatch causes updates to fail installation.

Confusing…yes. Easy to fix…well, for regular visitors to this site it is do-able, but it does require a visit to the registry. Diving into the registry is never something users WANT to do, even if they know how. Manually hacking the registry to get the whole thing to start working again is a workaround, but hardly an ideal solution.

XP users experiencing problems with Windows Update are urged to contact Microsoft customer service or visit support.microsoft.com/security.

Related:

Entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 5:56 pm under Microsoft.

Read more entries by Ema Kwiatkowski.
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