Sunday 17 February 2008

WindowsUpdate 0x8000FFFF fix

Just built a PC for someone with one of GigaByte's GA-73PVM-S2H motherboards. Its a nice spec nVidia based board including DDR2-800, VGA, DVI-D, HDMI, eSATA, 1394 Firewire (rear and front), SPDIF, 7.1 HD sound and support for 10xUSB - don't think there's a lot to compare at the price. I loaded Vista Home Premium OEM without incident, went to check WindowsUpdate and was greeted with error 0x8000FFFF which sounds like some non-specific default message. Trawling Google (but not Microsoft support) throws up similar errors and recommendations to uninstall update KB929777 - ah, but I hadn't actually loaded any updates so far. I did wonder whether not activating during install or immediately switching to Microsoft Update (i.e. Windows + other products) caused the error?

Fortunately at Ask Leo there's a comment from Mark Lewis / Eric M referring to some keys to delete in the registry (take a backup first!). Start regedit and head into HKLM\Components and remove the keys for PendingXmlIdentifier and AdvanceInstallerNeedResolving. Then restart and try WindowsUpdate again. Gotta be on the right track when the messages change from red to yellow :-)The update loaded in a blink with no prompts and and I had to manually run an update check again - now we were in business ...

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