Today I installed Win XP on two completely different machines. After installing XP SP3 onto these machines, the windows update service somehow stopped working: Although it downloaded the patches it failed to initialize their installation, no matter what patch was selected. The log at C:\windows\WindowsUpdate.log showed several lines looking like this:
FATAL: Error: 0×80070005. wuauclt handler: failed to spawn COM server
After browsing the web, I found a solution to this, re-registering some components of the update service fixes the issue. I wrote this tiny script to automatize the fix:
rem updatefix.bat
net stop wuauserv
cd %windir%\system32
regsvr32.exe /s wuweb.dll
regsvr32.exe /s wups2.dll
regsvr32.exe /s wups.dll
regsvr32.exe /s wucltui.dll
regsvr32.exe /s wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32.exe /s wuaueng.dll
regsvr32.exe /s wuapi.dll
net start wuauserv
pause
