Microsoft Windows Updates fail to install

Microsoft Windows Update failure: Are you having problems getting your Microsoft Windows Updates downloaded, are the Updates repeatedly failing to install? Recently after having upgraded to Serice Pack 3 for Windows XP, we had experienced the same issue. It appeared that the updates would continually fail to install on this particular machine. We tried stopping the automatic updates service, deleted all of our temp files, log files etc, but nothing seemed to help. On any attempt to download updates, the process would halt and say it failed to install them. As it turns out, the fix was relatively simple. Here is what we did.

How to fix the Microsoft Windows Update failure:

  1. Click Start -> Run, type cmd and click Ok
  2. Type the following commands and press Enter after each command
    • regsvr32 wuapi.dll
    • regsvr32 wuaueng.dll
    • regsvr32 wuaueng1.dll
    • regsvr32 wucltui.dll
    • regsvr32 wups.dll
    • regsvr32 wups2.dll
    • regsvr32 wuweb.dll
  3. Once finished, attempt to run Windows Update again and your downloads should complete and install.