A colleague recently contacted me regarding a nightmare he had been battling for almost a week where new PCs/servers joined to his domain that are Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 based never receive Windows Updates. The infrastructure he was working with was inherited and documentation was slim to non-existent. The error he received was the following:
Error Code 0x80072EE2
With the notice: "You receive updates: Managed by your system administrator"
This is expected if your PC is set to receive Windows Updates via the Windows Software Update Services and not from the standard Windows Updates servers. But this computer was wiped clean and, from what he tells me, had never had a group policy set related to this as he never set up such a thing.
None of the usual Windows Update repair tools that I knew of helped him. But, after some research, I located a fix. Please DO NOT proceed with this method if your computer uses Group Policy for Windows Update:
- Open RegEdit and navigatego to HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\ Windows\WindowsUpdate
- Remove any and all values within this key (but don't delete the key itself). Most likely, the culprit is a faulty Windows Update source server. Sometimes this is the result of a latent or previous infection. In this case, it was set to a server that crashed long before he got there and its reference was never removed.
- Finally, download and run this Microsoft Fixit Solution. Try the Default settings first, and if that does not work, try Aggressive.
- Reboot the computer and check to see that Windows Update is working properly.
