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How Can You Update Your Computer When the Thing That Updates Your Computer Is Broken?

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Simple, YOU CAN'T!!!

For a while now my computer's Automatic Updates has been broken. No new downloads have appeared, the control panel icon is missing, and the Windows Update site can't install the updated ActiveX control. Every time I go to the site it tries to update the WU client and I keep getting this 0x800703E3 funky error code.

Windows Update Codes - My error is pretty cryptic: "The I/O operation has been aborted because of either a thread exit or an application request"

I tried once already to fix it a while back but no luck so I just lived without it. Well, now I can't access certain resources since some security policies that I'm subject too aren't installed on my box. 

...Darn, I should have fixed the WU problem when I had the chance. Being stuck in IT limbo isn't fun! I didn't want to waste more of my time or some support engineer's time so I resigned myself to fix my own problem. Go me!

I whipped out my Swiss Army IT-Problem-Solver and selected the FileMon tool. Clearly visible to me were the marks from the last problem conqured by this device, in the include filter I could see "de*.exe"

I quickly configured the tool for this operation by setting the filter to "iexplore.exe" and turned on the capture. Then, I navigated the browser to https://windowsupdate.microsoft.com and waited impatiently for the ugly beast to appear. "There!" I whispered then snickered as I switched back to filemon and stopped the capture. I swiftly began searching for anything out of the ordinary. I was expecting to see some ACC_DENIED or FILE NOT FOUND errors but nothing. There appeared to be no suspicious entries until about half way up the log...at row 9087 I saw it, my first real clue: DEVICE DATA ERROR, and another ar row 9084: IN PAGE ERROR.

"Hmmmm..." I thought as I looked at the file name: c:\windows\system32\wuaucpl.cpl. Immediately I was able to recall what I know and what I could infer about this file:

  1. The "WU" portion of the file most likely stands for "Windows Update". I quick check on the dll help database could verify it for sure but I skipped that.
  2. The extension CPL is used for control panel icons. These files are actually executables with just a different extension.

Given these facts I browsed to the file with windows explorer and tried to launch the exe (wuaucpl.cpl). When I launched it I got an error: "Failed to launch executable due to an exception" or something along those lines. I didn't write the error message down because I was on to something and wasn't thinking clearly. Sorry for all you Googler's, et. al. out there. 

This was my smoking gun, a bad file (or bad sector on the disk where this file got put last time I defragged). All I had to do was replace the file with a good image of it.  If I were smart, and I'm not, I would have done a restore point when I first got this error. That would have easily restored the file to it's original shine. Unfortunately, again since I'm not smart, that restore point is so far gone not even a terrabyte worth of restore points could have kept track of it. Well, maybe 1 TB, but certainly not 1 GB worth!

Luckily I'm a computer nerd and had a secondary computer around where I could just copy this file. Thankfully the donor computer was of a similar breed and the file name, timestamp, and all the other things Windows File Protection cares about was the same so I could just overwrite the existing file and be on my way.

Here I sit writing this entry as my computer happy checks for updates and downloads the...hold on a sec while I check....127.7MB of updates needed for my computer. I'm sure there will be a second, if not third batch by the time all of the updates are applied.

So kids, what is the moral of the story? If you're getting error number 0x800703E3 when visiting windows update, use filemon to see what file the update is failing on.

Happy updating ever after!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 26, 2006
    Interesting. I have a PC at home which can't prove to any site that IE is actually IE. Windows Update is impossible because it requires IE 6. Zone.msn.com requires IE. Even hotmail and mail.live.com require IE 6. Hello!? That's what I'm using here!

    Reinstalling IE6 doesn't fix the problem, and IE 7 is only available to XP users, so except for Firefox, I'm SOL.

    The Windows Update problem is a little worrisome because it means that my little old Win2K machine probably isn't very secure, but the other stuff I am not so concerned about.

    MS could probably get rid of the IE requirement altogether (like in XP) and let users like me, with apparently broken systems, get the required security updates with a separate application that won't fail when talking to the WU server.

  • Anonymous
    July 26, 2006
    I have found that some adware signals its presence by turning Automatic Updates off. Perhaps you had a similar problem?

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    July 26, 2006
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    July 27, 2006
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    July 27, 2006
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    July 27, 2006
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